“It’s beautiful, Emmy. What’s it called?”
“The sixty-four hands of Bagua-zhang.”
“Where did you learn it?”
“I haven’t… not really… but an old man was kind enough to show me this much the other day.” A noise from the doorway caught her attention, and she turned to see the couple again, the tall scholar and the young woman. The woman tilted her head to consider what she’d seen, and the man placed a fist against an open palm and bowed his head in her direction. Emily nodded, then pulled Li Li toward another exit. “We’d better get moving.”
The path along the mountainside to the Zi Xiao Gong, or Purple Cloud Temple, led down serpentine staircases interspersed with long landings. Here and there, oak trees reached branches overhead, but walls on one side and the cliff edge on the other meant they were exposed for much of the way. Emily kept a close watch for operatives, whom she expected to identify by their dress and manner. But would they be so easy to spot? What she did see – though how to understand it was far from clear – was the couple from the South Cliff Temple… and the Golden Temple… and running along the path under the cable car.
“Look, Emmy, it’s a school. Can we stay and watch?” Over a hundred people in exercise clothes occupied the lower terrace, arranged neatly in rows, tracing out a fluid technique all in a sort of unison, though the back rows were perhaps not as accomplished as the ones in front.
“Yes, sweetheart. Of course we can. Let’s watch from over there,” she said, indicating a smaller, upper terrace. The class practiced eight techniques, which Emily figured represented one layer of the sixty-four hands.
“Isn’t that what you were doing before?”
“Yes, it is… almost,” a man’s voice observed behind them. Emily turned to see the couple, the tall scholar and the woman with the braid. “But your skill is much greater, much more fluid…
“… like the butcher who no longer gives a thought to his technique,” the woman added. “The principle of Daoist wu shu is to act without acting.”
The final phrase – wei wu wei – echoed in Emily’s ear for a long moment. This is the message Wu Yutian was trying to convey to her, not just in words, but in the very fabric of his life, like an Old Testament prophet. Action unencumbered by the baggage of taking action, by the paradox of seizing the initiative, this represented a completely new direction in her thinking. She’d glimpsed it in the old man’s pottery studio, and here it was again.
“Are you here to study, sifu?” the man asked.
“No,” Emily said. “Not really… well, sort of.” In fact, she hardly knew what had led her to Wudangshan. But it might make Li Li feel safer to think they had a purpose greater than merely hiding in plain sight. “A friend said I might complete my training here, with Liang Zhenpu.”
The man laughed like a donkey on hearing this and the woman said, “I think your friend is having some fun at your expense. Master Liang has been dead for more than eight decades.”
“But the tile images you saw at the South Cliff Temple are the last remaining record of his teaching,” the man said. “So, in a sense, you have trained with him.”
“Master Liang is who we train with, too,” the woman said. “He was the first bagua master to combine the teachings of Dong Haichuan, the founder of our style, and all of his disciples. These are the sixty-four hands.”
“My friend assures me that there are many more than sixty-four.”
This was the woman’s cue to laugh, with a high-pitched cackle, and the man nodded his head. “Yes, your friend is right. Master Liang’s vision was not limited to a finite set of techniques. Everything and anything can be made use of in bagua-zhang.”
“Bagua is the Dao. It teaches us to distinguish real limits from mere conventions,” the woman added.
As enjoyable as it was to listen to these two strangers describe their wushu philosophy, another imperative guided Emily’s consciousness at this moment. Two men in suits had arrived at the lower terrace from the stairs leading to the South Cliff Temple, breathing more heavily than is normal in formal dress. Two more men arrived from the lower path, and they exchanged gestures before fanning out into the Purple Cloud Temple complex. These did not appear to be Wu Wei’s men – she didn’t recognize any of them… and why would any of his people be this anxious to find her?
Emily grabbed Li Li’s hand and tugged her away. “I’m sorry, but we can’t stay.” She glanced over one shoulder, as if to take leave from this peculiar couple, but they had already departed as well. Avoiding the men in suits was now her top priority, but since they appeared to have converged on this location from both directions, she couldn’t risk the main descent toward the Monkey Valley Gate. The path to the Wulong Gong, or Five Dragon Temple, beckoned from behind a broken sign, a diversion from the main routes, and not as heavily used by tourists. Dirt and gravel instead of pavement and stone steps, and the path narrowed to a single file and low branches reached across. Emily began to wonder if they hadn’t strayed from the established route altogether.
“Just pretend we’re chasing Stone,” Emily said, when Li Li’s pace started to flag.
“Chasing him,” she snorted. “… more like he’d be chasing us.”
“According to this map, the temple is four hundred meters down.”
“So it should only take a couple minutes.”
“More like twenty or thirty… it’s not a straight line. Just keep moving.”
They burst through some encroaching foliage, and what remained of the Five Dragon Temple beckoned to them, a central hall atop six broad flights of steps, flanked on each side by smaller halls. The ruins of other buildings were still visible in the distance, though the forest had begun to assimilate them into its verdant heart again, like romantic ruins covered in moss and weeds.
Emily paused at the bottom of the main steps to consider their next move. According to the tourist map she’d found at their hotel, they were less than a mile from a bus that would take them to the Wudang train station. But she didn’t know how reliable the map’s information was, and worried that a slow bus might allow their pursuers to overtake them. Even more unsettling than all the rest was her own confusion about the identity of these men. Above all, however, to preserve the possibility of a reunion with Jiang Xi, she needed to avoid drawing official attention to Li Li, whatever it was these men might want.
If they hadn’t been spotted taking the diversion toward Wulong Gong, if such an assumption was in any way safe, it might be an hour or more before anyone thought of looking for them here… if people were even looking for them at all. She wished to believe this was all a misunderstanding on her part, and even if it wasn’t, she still hoped to maintain Li Li’s good spirits, the better to run if necessary, and these would be bolstered by preserving the illusion that they were just tourists.
Inside the main hall, a large central chamber contained another set of bronze castings of Zhenwu, surrounded by figures of the ‘golden boy’ and the ‘jade girl,’ and the two generals of fire and water. A pair of swallows fluttered among the rafters, having entered through an open window.
“Why is he called an emperor here? He was a god in the last temple, wasn’t he?”
“I suppose emperors are like gods,” Emily said, after casting her eyes around the hall, and choking down her misgivings about wasting an extra moment here. “At least, to ordinary people, don’t you think?”
“You mean because nobody gets to see them, Emmy?”
“… and he rules over fire and water…”
“… and gold and jade.
“Exactly. In the South Cliff Temple he rode a snake and a turtle into battle, and here he commands the elements.”
In a side chamber, the floor tiles were laid out in another octagon with a yin and yang symbol in the center. A mural wrapped around three walls with similar images of wushu poses to what they’d seen before. Li Li placed her feet along one edge and held her hands out, one high the other extended to the side,
then stepped to her right and assumed a second stance, and then a third.
“How am I doing, Emmy?”
“Your form is excellent, sweetheart. But I think we should keep moving.”
“Come, do it with me, please… ’cause I forget what comes next.”
Emily hesitated, glancing at each of the doors of the chamber. Perhaps she could indulge her for a moment, or three. Teaching her a new style, one that Stone wouldn’t also have seen, could prove to be the last bonding moment they’d enjoy for years to come… if only they could get off this damned mountain. Her heart pounded in her ears, as she weighed the probabilities and shivered at a premonition of darker forces gathering around them.
Li Li’s movements around the octagon tugged at the periphery of her visual attention, until a shriek, high-pitched, almost a giggle, but not from pleasure… the off note pulled Emily from her indecision, and she saw them.
Two men had appeared, one at each entrance, and Li Li had frozen at the sight. One man spoke into a handset, while the other dangled shackles and gestured to them. Emily grabbed Li Li by the wrist and pulled her toward the door, staring down the man who moved to block their way. He dropped the handset and reached for her arm – Emily swatted his hand aside, nudged his elbow up to make room for a sharp jab to the ribs under his arm, and kicked through a knee, forcing him to the ground, before bringing her own knee up into his face. With a glance at the other man, who’d been frozen by what he’d just seen and didn’t seem prepared to pursue, she tugged on Li Li’s hand and stepped over the limp body clogging the doorway.
She paused for a moment at the top of the main temple steps to allow Li Li to gather herself, scanned the scene for any threatening figures, and then they were off again, down six flights, taking two or three at a time, occasionally four, practically flying through the air – if only they could fly, soar above the treetops, leaving their pursuers far below and behind, whoever they might be. Li Li wriggled free of her grasp at the bottom, her face ashen.
“Who were those men, Emmy? What do they want?”
“There’s no time, sweetheart. Please, trust me.”
Returning to the path was much too dangerous, since that’s where the main pursuit must come from. She tugged Li Li around the side of the temple, dodged between two columns that no longer supported anything, and headed into a field of ruined buildings. At the far end, the forest beckoned, and behind that a ridgeline offered some promise of safety – if only they could clear it before they were spotted.
She heard shouting behind them as the pursuit organized itself, and then gunfire, and a bullet struck the top of a nearby broken wall. There was no chance they hadn’t been seen, and now she had no option besides the forest. Emily reached back to pull Li Li along, though this was hardly necessary as she was already running ahead. The foliage would provide no protection, but at least they couldn’t be targeted from long range. Branches slapped at them as they ran, grabbing at clothes and hair.
“Quick, this way.”
Emily directed Li Li to the left, behind a thicket, and set off a cloud of moths. A nearby woodpecker paused in his rat-a-tat to observe their progress, and Emily glanced up to spot him on an upper branch. Why take the time? Why now? She hardly knew, but something in the scene commanded her attention. Another moment passed and she gathered herself again, and led Li Li to the ridgeline, on the other side of which the only remaining hope for safety lay.
On the downslope, they turned right and headed back up the slope, before their pursuers could see which way they went. Emily knew she couldn’t keep Li Li running like this indefinitely – her strength would flag, and at some point, she’d need to explain things to her, at least, some things. But, for the moment, all she could do was to urge a thirteen year old girl on a bit further.
A rocky formation a few yards ahead might provide a moment’s respite, but two more men appeared from the far side. No time to wait for them to commit to an attack, Emily launched herself at them like a screaming harpy, striking one man in the groin and clawing at the face of other… but it wasn’t as easy to settle with them as she needed it to be, perhaps because the stakes were so high, with Li Li next to her. More men appeared before she could extricate herself from these, and soon they were surrounded.
Keeping Li Li behind her, she fended off all approaches, but now the worst thing had overtaken them. She prepared herself for the next paroxysm of violence that was about to become necessary – something she’d not had to unleash in front of Li Li before, not even in the worst moments in Kamchatka. Even then it had been possible to shield her from the ugliest deeds of which she was capable. How strange that such reservations should crowd in on her now. Could she tear a man’s life from his throat, talon-like, and then turn falcon-eyed to Li Li and still expect her to follow?
A moment later, she heard the fateful words, at first through one of the radios the men carried – “Shoot her! Shoot the girl!” – and thought they sounded familiar, a woman’s voice, a southern accent using the soft, insinuating tones of command. No, it couldn’t be. The men were caught entirely by surprise, too, and hesitated, confused. Emily seized on the moment and broke through their perimeter to charge down the hill on the far side of the rocks.
“Shoot the girl,” the same voice commanded, now even more forcefully, and Emily heard it not through the radios, but in person. Whoever was speaking hadn’t cleared the rocks yet, but some of her men had leveled weapons at them. Perhaps they were ready to comply now. Emily seized a fallen branch and struck the nearest man before he could fire, and disarmed a second, taking his weapon and firing several rounds to cover their escape.
A running gun battle was the last thing Emily had hoped for this day, and yet what choice did she have? Worse yet, she had to wonder if putting them on the flight to Shanghai had set them down this path. By her current accounting, her mind racing from one hasty surmise to the next, every decision since soul had led them precisely to this outcome. A darker thought occurred to her: Choi Kyung Min had been killed to provoke her into a rash move. The prospect of keeping Li Li safe was fast becoming a vanishing quantity, and yet all she could do was press on, seek the next rise, find a crowd somewhere to lose themselves in, perhaps by the train station. If only they could get off this damn mountain.
“Shoot the girl.”
Emily emptied the magazine to slow the pursuit, then discarded the gun and turned Li Li once again down the slope. But the pursuit simply could not be outrun – two men lunged at them from behind a tree, and Emily dispatched them, one head-first into the trunk, the other felled by a kick to the face and an elbow to the throat as he went down. A third man grabbed Li Li’s arm, and Emily pivoted to bring a wheel-kick through the back of his head.
“Shoot the girl.”
Emily tried to pull Li Li away, but she saw two men in the distance who’d found a line of fire on them, and there was nothing to do but shield her. The rounds burned as they struck her, twice in the back and once in the thigh, and she staggered forward, pushing Li Li before her behind the cover of a dead trunk.
“Emmy…”
“Are you hit?”
“No, Emmy, I don’t think so… but what about you? You’re bleeding.”
“Shoot the girl.”
Emily turned to see who would give such an order, now that it would no longer serve the purpose of slowing them down. They must have been targeting Li Li all along, something Emily had not imagined possible before. In the distance, just clearing the rock formation, she thought she saw a familiar face, one she almost half-expected to see – Kwok Kit Yee. The circle of men closed around them, and Emily felt the world tilt to one side and begin to spin.
Through a growing darkness, she caught a glimpse of something disrupting their tormentors, scattering them in terror. A flash and a glint of metal, to the extent she could make it out, she thought it might be a chain whip – one of those segmented steel rods from the Hong Kong kung fu movies she used to watch with her dad. This one seemed
to have a blade on one end, and Emily watched as it unfurled its seven or eight segments and stabbed one man in the chest. Yanked loose, it swirled again, spraying blood, and struck a man in the neck, and then another across the face. Another dark shape moved like a blur from shadow to shadow, spinning a pair of tactical batons, and a man lurched forward, limbs splayed awkwardly, around another’s neck two legs seemed to catch him in some sort of scissor hold and twist him down into silence. The screaming rang in her ears, and soon it was silent, and she recognized them – the scholar calmly folded up his weapon, and his partner, the woman with the long braid, joined him a moment later.
“They’re on the run,” she said.
“How much time do we have?”
“It’ll take them awhile to regroup… and the wounded…”
“Sifu,” he said, crouching next to Emily. “We have to hurry. Can you stand?”
“I don’t think so,” she heard herself say, before everything went completely black.
26
An Unexpected Phone Call
“You’re getting soft, Savaransky.” Standing by the highway on a moonless night, Danko sent a coded text using the mobile phone he’d swapped a jeep for a few days earlier. The Tatmadaw had scrambled several armored personnel carriers to mount a pursuit, but rugged as they were, they weren’t presented with a single direction to respond in, and the modified scooters Danko’s men rode were just too nimble to be captured by that sort of vehicle. “You weren’t so squeamish back on Itbayat, as I recall.”
“Those weren’t country conscripts on Itbayat,” Connie said. “They were Diao’s picked men.”
“Why don’t you just admit it, you’ve lost…”
“… twelve strikes and you think I’ve lost my edge.”
“But no kills.”
Girl Goes To Wudang (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 7) Page 28