Eight Skilled Gentlemen mlanto-3

by Barry Hughart

  I have a cousin who works on Coal Hill. He’s a professional and proud of his mastery of the craft. What he does is dress in black clothes and blacken his face and hands with soot so he won’t be seen at night. Then he takes a long sharp pin—much longer than a knitting needle—and crawls into the pen where the geese are kept, and just at the right moment when guests arrive he jabs the geese in the ass. The hissing and honking of geese is considered a lucky omen, you see, and the trick is to get a chorus of squawks just as wealthy people descend to the lowly cringing earth, and he’s very good at it. I once asked him if he considered expanding his trade to include dyeing the geese pink (also a lucky omen) and he was furious. He’s a master bird-butt jabber, and lowly pinion painters are scarcely in his social class! Besides, they have a closed guild and the only way to qualify is through heredity.

  The lane our palanquin turned into wasn’t lit up for guests but our informant had been certain the owner was home. Master Li put on his grandest air of Neo-Confucian superiority and sneered lesser servants out of the way until he got the majordomo, and a flash of the commission from the Celestial Master was sufficient to send the fellow bowing and cringing upstairs to seek the master of the house. We waited in a very elegant room where ancient artifacts were displayed, but Master Li was not impressed.

  “Nine tenths,” he stated flatly, “are palpable fakes, and the tenth that isn’t is of little value. The one exception is this toad dropper, which is done in the earliest example of the glaze called Pretty Girl Sky-Clearing I’ve ever seen.”

  Toad droppers are little ceramic toads with a chamber to hold water and a built-in dropper. You use them to moisten an ink-stone with just the right amount of ink for a perfect stroke, and Master Li has a very nice collection of them. When he bent over and slipped aside the false heel of his left sandal I turned pale.

  “Sir… ah… Venerable Sir, don’t you think it would be unwise to… ah…”

  He came up with his lock picks, and a moment later the case held one less toad dropper. I mention this to explain why I was already unnerved when we heard the screams. They were high strangled screams, clearly from somewhere in the house, and I automatically bent over for the old man to leap upon my back.

  “Quick! We’ll make a run for it!” I cried.

  As soon as I felt his weight I galloped to the hall and out the door, and I was halfway across the outer courtyard before I realized that Master Li was pounding my head and shoulders and yelling, “Stop, you idiot!” I skidded to a halt and he twisted on my back, and then a gnarled finger shot past the side of my head and pointed. “There!”

  It finally dawned on me that I was supposed to run toward the screams, not away from them, and in a way it was fortunate that I’d panicked and run outside. Master Li was pointing to an upper story where the silhouette of somebody who seemed to be fighting could be seen behind a gauzy curtain, and I made a mental note of the location and charged back inside and started up the stairs.

  The screams were coming from the majordomo, but I doubt he was aware of the noise he was making. His eyes were wide and glazed with shock and his mouth opened and closed automatically as he stood petrified at an open doorway on the second story. I shoved him out of the way. Master Li slipped down off my back and I heard the sharp click as the rattan coil inside his right sleeve shot the throwing knife from the sheath strapped to his forearm up into his hand. I dove through the door low and fast, hitting the floor and rolling left and jumping up braced for an attack, but there was no attack. I stood there rather like the majordomo had, frozen in place with my mouth gaping foolishly, and from the lack of motion behind me I assumed Master Li was also standing and staring. The scene was complicated, and took a bit of sorting out.

  In the foreground, meaning the center of the elegant room, stood a man whose face was covered by the hood of a big old-fashioned cloak. He was methodically using a stone striker to bang the most ancient of all instruments, a set of stone chimes. He was standing on one leg because that’s all he had: one single leg, growing squarely from the center of his body. In front of him a man in elegant mandarin dress was dancing to the chime music, but it was a dance of death.

  His robes whipped wildly through the air as he leaped and capered across the floor, twisting and jumping with manic energy, kicking his legs high above his head, whipping his feet down to pound the floor as though attempting to drive holes through it. His eyes were quite insane, driven mad by pain, and he would have been howling if he had the breath. I gasped and jumped back instinctively when I saw white splinters of bone thrusting from his silk-covered thighs, and blood dripped down his knees. This mandarin had danced until both thighs shattered, and he was dancing still, and now blood was bubbling from his mouth and nose and I realized his insides had been pounded to jelly. He leaped even higher. His feet struck the floor even harder as the stone chimes thudded monotonously, and the bone splinters thrust out farther and farther, and then a great gush of blood came from his mouth and the light of insane agony died in his eyes.

  When the one-legged creature continued to pound on the old stone chimes he was making a corpse dance for him. That mandarin was dead. I knew it as surely as I knew I was still alive, but I also knew the body was dancing like a doll of straw around the room, head lolling and bouncing lifelessly on his shoulders, arms and hands flapping around without guidance, both broken legs bending almost double where they shouldn’t bend, between knee and hip, blood from the gaping mouth spraying around the room in a fine pink mist.

  That, mind you, was only the scene in the foreground. Simultaneously my brain was trying to accommodate the background as well, but it was difficult because with an overdose of grotesque images they tend to cancel one another out. Everything was getting blurred, and I shook my head vigorously—the first motion I’d been capable of—and decided I really was looking at another weird creature. It was a man, yet the face was that of a hideous ape with a silver-gray forehead, a scarlet nose, bright blue cheeks, and a yellow chin. I can’t explain why, but I knew in my bones this wasn’t actor’s makeup. This was real, and the man-ape bared strong white teeth in an expression between a grimace and a smile as it looked at Master Li and me, and then in one powerful bound it was at the wall, and with another effortless leap it was out the window and down into the garden and gone, vanished into the night, but not before I’d seen that it was carrying something.

  The weird creature had been carrying a cage precisely like the one Master Li had.

  Master Li had stepped up beside me, and now he whirled back toward the center of the room just as the stone chimes stopped playing and the dancing corpse collapsed limply to the floor, as though someone had cut the strings operating a puppet. The one-legged hooded figure stood motionless.

  “Careful, Ox.”

  As if I needed the warning. I moved forward cautiously, scooping up a heavy bronze figurine as a weapon, and Master Li made a flanking movement with his knife cocked beside his right ear. The chimes player still made no motion. I was at an angle where I could look straight him—or it—and in the dark shadows behind the opening of the hood I thought I saw the gleam of a single eye in the center of a forehead.

  Suddenly there was a bright flash that blinded me. I gasped and stepped back, covering my eyes, and gradually the orange haze and black spots cleared, and I stared at the room. So did Master Li, blinking and rubbing his eyes, and there wasn’t any one-legged chimes player. He wasn’t in the room, and he wasn’t in the hall outside, and the wind whipped the curtains away from the window and we gazed out and up at the night sky, where a great white crane was slowly flying away across the face of the moon.

  4

  “Well, Kao, have you found anything interesting?” the Celestial Master asked.

  “Mildly so,” Master Li replied. “To begin with, another mandarin—I assume you know, or knew, Mao Ou-Hsi?”

  “Revolting fellow. Third-greediest man in the empire, the Celestial Master said disgustedly.

  “The
fourth-greediest will be interested, because he’s just been promoted,” Master Li said. “Mao bade farewell to the red dust of earth last night in a rather spectacular manner. Ox and I happened to be there at the moment, and the creature who killed Mao then disappeared in a bright blinding flash, and the next thing we saw was a white crane flying away across the moon.”

  The Celestial Master paused with a teacup halfway to his lips. Briefly, in an instant in which his eyes sharpened and hardened, I glimpsed the brilliance and sureness of long ago, when he had been considered to be the finest mind in the empire.

  “How convenient,” he said dryly. “Did it carry a sign in its beak saying ‘Save the Celestial Master from Mother Meng’s Madhouse?’ “

  Master Li tossed his head back and laughed. “Believe it or not, this actually happened,” he said. “As soon as we’d looked around and found nothing we summoned the magistrate to take over, and at the moment the gates opened at dawn we entered the Forbidden City and chased the honor guard away from the remains of the late Ma Tuan Lin, and I had Ox open the coffin. You tell it, Ox.”

  I gulped nervously as the bright eyes of the saint flicked toward me.

  “Most Reverend Sir, the corpse was lying on its back, of course, but I managed to lift it upright—”

  “That must have been a hell of a job,” the Celestial Master said, with real concern in his voice.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “The body was covered with Dragon’s Brains (Borneo camphor), which made me choke, and after I scooped it away I started to choke from the smell of the corpse, and there wasn’t any head and it looked horrible.” I started choking again, just at the memory. ‘The body was stiff as a tree trunk and I almost got a hernia trying to lift it.”

  “Ghastly tub of lard, wasn’t he?” the Celestial Master said sympathetically.

  “He hadn’t missed much rice,” I said diplomatically. “Master Li had me prop him up so we could examine the back.”

  “And?”

  “Reverend Sir, it was just as you told us!” I said excitedly. “The entrance mark of the fireball was very small and the folds of robes covered it up, but Master Li cut through the clothes and skin, and just beneath the outer flesh there was a great big hole! Everything inside had been burned to a crisp.”

  The saint sipped his tea and put the cup down, and then he leaned back and rubbed his eyes.

  “How odd,” he said. “Kao, I’d just discovered what caused me to hallucinate about that old man and his ball of fire, and now you tell me I wasn’t hallucinating.”

  He leaned forward, and his eyes were clear and keen. “I’m going to show you what might have stimulated a senile imagination, but first I’m interested in a matter of symmetry. You say Mao Ou-Hsi died spectacularly. Was a monster involved?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Master Li told what we had seen, simply and clearly, and as he talked I saw wonder and speculation form in the saint’s eyes.

  “Well, Kao, I said at the beginning this was your sort of case, but I didn’t know how right I was,” the Celestial Master said. “Before I tell what I know, is there anything else you want to add?”

  “Indeed yes. Beginning with this,” said Master Li, and he pulled the cage we’d found from beneath his robes and placed it on the table.

  “Pretty, and it looks like the thing Ma was carrying, but what is it?” the Celestial Master asked.

  “Damn. I was hoping you could tell me once you got a close look at it,” Master Li said. “It is indeed the cage you saw and we found it where you said it was. The interesting thing is that Ma Tuan Lin had made a rubbing of an old stone carving depicting a cage like this. On the back he indicated he might have found as many as eight of them. A plausible inference is that he gave cages to partners in some sort of enterprise, and I had traced one to Mao Ou-Hsi, which is why we were there. Simultaneous with the murder the cage was being stolen, and the burglar was another monster. It was a man resembling an ape like the one the emperor takes such pride in at the imperial bestiary: silver-gray fur or skin on the forehead, bright blue cheeks, a crimson nose, and a yellow chin. The eyes are deep and shadowed, and the gaze is highly intelligent.”

  The Celestial Master nodded. “A mandrill, if one excepts the intelligence. Why do you say ‘man-ape’?”

  Master Li shrugged. “So far as I could tell, the body was that of a medium-size but very powerful and acrobatic man, and both the body motion and eye contact were human.”

  The saint nodded and said, “The creature means nothing to me. He got away with Mao’s cage, you say? Another crane?”

  “No, he simply leaped out the window to the garden before either of us could move. Speaking of monsters, the vampire ghoul who decapitated Ma Tuan Lin is dead, in case you haven’t heard, and I haven’t the slightest idea what its connection to the rest of it is. I’m trying to track down the owners of the other cages, and until I can find out why monsters would want them I’m at the end of a blank alley.”

  Master Li leaned back and the Celestial Master leaned forward, taking a sheaf of papers from a lacquered box lying on the table.

  “I can’t tell you why the cages are valuable, but I can give you something to think about concerning monsters,” he said. “When I was a young student—long before you were born, believe it or not—I went through the normal period of fascination with ancient shamanism. That means shamanism of the aborigines who originally inhabited China, of course, practiced by priests of beliefs and rites that to some extent evolved into our own, and I found repeated but maddeningly unspecific references to a small group of shamans who seem to have been greatest of all: Super Shamans, if you will, aloof and mysterious, to be appealed to only as a last resort. I was never able to prove this, Kao, but I became convinced that they’re the mysterious hooded figures depicted on the walls of the Yu.”

  “Really?” Master Li appeared to be very interested. “Any specific reason?”

  “One specific, one not. The nonspecific is simply the fact that they were spoken of with awe as always being silent, always performing mysterious rituals with mysterious objects beyond the grasp of man—the general atmosphere of the Yu, if you will, and the Yu and the shamans would seem to date from the same period. The specific is that there were eight of them, like the eight Yu figures, and indeed they were known as Pa Neng Chih Shih.”

  “ ‘Eight Skilled Gentlemen,’ “ Master Li said thoughtfully. “Sounds like they may have practiced alchemy or engineering or astronomy in addition to their priestly and magical duties.”

  The Celestial Master shrugged. “I never found a clear reference to their exact function, and I doubt anyone did. There was, however, one extraordinarily interesting fragment concerning them that I put down at the time as primitive myth, but peculiar enough to make notes of.”

  The saint picked up the sheaf of papers and shook his head wonderingly as he looked at them.

  “So long ago,” he said softly. “It had completely fled what’s left of my mind, and then suddenly, after you’d left for Hortensia Island, I remembered, and at least I keep good files. Long, long ago, the Eight Skilled Gentlemen were said to have enlisted the aid of eight very minor demon-deities, siblings although physically dissimilar. What they wanted them for was no longer known, but a brief description of each was provided. You can see why I planned to show you the origin of a hallucination.”

  He slid a paper across the table. It was old and somewhat faded, but still clear, and I caught my breath. Years ago as a young scholar the Celestial Master had sketched a little old man who carried a glowing ball of fire, and beneath it he had written, “Third demon-deity: Pi-fang, kills with something like a tiny comet.”

  Master Li whistled sharply.

  “Save your whistles,” the Celestial Master said with a smile, and he slid another sheet across the table. This time I uttered a distinct yelp, and then turned bright red as the Celestial Master winked at me.

  We were looking at a one-legged
creature who was playing something like stone chimes, and beneath it was neatly written, “Fifth demon-deity, K’uei, the Dancing Master. Kills by forcing victims to dance themselves to death.”

  Master Li’s eyes were gleaming. He seized an ink stick and a stone and a brush and some paper and went to work, swiftly copying each sketch and brief descriptive comment. Each of the eight creatures was very odd in that it was a killer whose ability to kill was limited to a specialty that couldn’t possibly massacre large numbers of people, such as our modern crossbows and exploding charges of Fire Drug—but then, I had to admit that the very limits and peculiarities made violent death seem real and terrible, like strangling hands around one’s throat as opposed to a random missile that strikes by accident on a battlefield.