Teacher let out a great sigh of relief. "Praise All for that much... all right, Jin. You've had a close call. Now what? Do you have a plan?"
"No." As much as it pained her to admit it, Jin did not. She sat there for a moment, looking glum. Teacher glanced at his strange watch, but made no move to leave. Frank and Ling remained at the same discreet distance they had maintained since Jin first sat on the bench.
"Are you thinking about Shiro?" Teacher asked finally.
"Actually," Jin said, "I was thinking about being in love. I mean, I don't want another lecture, but before... you know, before I found out who I was, it was always something I thought would happen. I even went looking for it a time or two. And with all the hassles and disappointments, there's a part of me that feels very sad to give up the idea of ever being in love."
"Karma doesn't care about romantic love one way or another, except for the cause and effect aspect," Teacher said. "And yet I'm mortal now too, and there's a part of me -- not the Emma-O King of the First Hell me, but the sixty-six years old homeless and ugly Teacher Johnson me -- that still wants to believe in love. For what little that's worth to either of us."
Jin leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. He rubbed the spot, thoughtfully. "What was that for?"
"No reason," Jin said. "Though I do think I owe you a thank you.'"
"You're welcome."
"One thing I forgot to mention." Jin told Teacher about the fact that, for a while, she had a connection with Shiro just as if he'd been ready to move on. "He gave me the slip, finally, and when I saw him next the connection wasn't there."
"I don't know anyone else who could do that. If you want my opinion, it means that somewhere there's a deeper, wiser side of him that can still be reached. Maybe that's my optimism talking."
Teacher was looking at his watch again. "No rest for either the wicked or the judgmental; I've got to go. Oh, by the way." Teacher reached into his duster and pulled out a rather wrinkled piece of torn newsprint. "I know you've been busy. I've got the details here for Joyce's funeral. It's tomorrow. I thought you'd want to know."
Teacher left her holding the scrap of paper and walked off into the trees. Jin stared at the announcement for a little while.
"You're going, aren't you?" Ling asked. It sounded like an accusation.
"Of course I am."
"Why?" Ling asked. "I have it on good authority that the person you knew as Joyce Masters was reborn into Medias just this morning."
"That doesn't matter. My friend is gone, and I'm going to mourn that properly. It's a human thing, I guess. Teacher understood that."
"Teacher is trapped in his own body at the moment. His advice may not be the best," Frank said. "With all due respect to his Hellish Majesty."
Jin just stood up. "I'm going to take a walk. You two aren't coming."
"What do you wish of us?" Ling asked.
At the moment she just wanted the both of them out of her sight, but she didn't say that. "For now just do whatever you want."
Ling and Frank exchanged one more of those glances that made Jin think they were talking behind her back in front of her face and then both vanished, this time through the same portal of light. When she was certain they were gone, Jin sat back down on the bench. She looked at the funeral announcement again. There wasn't a lot to it. Four column inches about Joyce and her work for the Legal Aid Office, and no cause of death listed. Then the date, place, and time: April 23rd, Willowbrook Memorial Chapel, 2:00 PM.
You'd think there'd be more.
Jin wasn't really sure what she'd expected, she just knew that this wasn't it. There was so much more to Joyce's life. How could anyone sum it up in four inches of newsprint? Or forty, for that matter? Yet here it was, short and to the point. A life gone. They may as well have said, "She's dead and you're not. Say goodbye and get on with it." Maybe that was the point. Maybe they were even right, given all that she had learned in the past few weeks. That didn't change the need to mourn.
Jin felt a tug at her wrist. She ignored it as long as she could, but that wasn't long. It was rather insistent. Jin peeked with her Third Eye and there was the golden thread, right where she knew it would be. She sighed.
No rest for the merciful. Just don't look for mercy from two to four o'clock tomorrow.
She got up slowly and let the cord guide her. When she emerged from the entrance to the park the tug was to the left, down Elysian toward Pepper Street. Jin didn't need the cord to guide her for a while after that. She only paused when Elysian crossed Pepper Street to be sure that the cord was, in fact, pulling her toward the Gateway to All the Hells and not onward to a destination in Medias itself.
The tug got even more insistent. Jin frowned. She didn't remember any of the previous instances feeling like this, even the ones that had been fairly time critical. She thought of summoning either Frank or Ling in an attempt to speed things up, but that was no good. Jin knew from before that only Guan Yin -- or rather, her current incarnation -- could get direction from the cord. Frank and Ling could see it but they couldn't go directly to where it led because they didn't know where that was any more than Jin did, at least until she had followed the cord to its end. Jin found herself almost at a trot, trying to match the pull of the cord as she ducked into the alley. When she emerged in the Gateway she was running.
"Where?"
Jin realized she'd asked the question aloud even though she hadn't expected an answer. She still got one, of a sort. The Guardians sounded unhappy. IMMANENT ONE, WE CANNOT...
"You can't... mark the way?" Jin said, already short of breath.
NO.
Jin understood what that meant. "Bloody hell..."
She took off at a dead run and the cord kept pace. She passed through the door without bothering to opening it. Jin felt the familiar instant of shimmer and disorientation that followed and then she was off down the corridor with barely a pause.
Don't let me be late, not this time. This is my chance!
Jin knew the corridor itself wasn't real; she didn't need another disorienting peek of the Third Eye to remind herself of it. She also knew that the distance she was covering was at once illusory and yet far vaster than it appeared. She didn't know how to travel instantly the way Frank and Ling did, but she also knew that being in a hurry actually did help. She focused on reaching the door at the opposite end of the corridor and, though her impatience made it seem a very long time indeed, in seconds she was there and through the door and out into --
The Mountain of Needle--oww!
Jin staggered and nearly fell. She leaned against a bare spot of stone long enough to tug a wicked-looking thorn about an inch long from the bottom of her foot. Her blood trickled into the rubble and debris at the bottom of the mountain even as the cord pulled her to go higher. Jin changed to demon form but that only helped a little. The spikes were cruel even to her hard scaly demon feet and when they touched the fresh wound on her foot it was even worse, but she kept moving. She moved through a forest of spikes as she climbed; changing to demon form had at least given her a second wind. Up ahead she heard what sounded like a fight.
Jin did not understand this. The victims of demons might wail and writhe and protest, but she had yet to hear of any of them fighting back. Jin hobbled along as fast as she could. She emerged from a thicket of spikes on a high plateau and found the battle.
Shiro?
Shiro was the only one Jin recognized at first. He was changing rapidly from human form to shadow as he tried to avoid his attackers, but he was losing. Two luminous beings floated in the air above him. One bore a trident of light that pierced and tore at the shadow that was Shiro and he cried out in pain, the other struck as well with extended claws and also found its mark.
The other, Jin realized dully, was a dragon.
Shiro became aware of her first. He smiled bitterly. "Come to see your handiwork, Jin?"
The dragon glanced in Jin's direction and she could almost swear that it uttered a curse.
"STOP!"
The force of Jin's demon voice actually shattered several spikes like glass, and in that instant everyone did stop, frozen in place like a photograph, but it didn't last. Shiro reverted to purely human form and fell to his knees, bruised and bleeding. Lung Nu and Shan Cai, for their part, looked at once defiant and as guilty as children caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
"We were so close!" Lung Nu said, ruefully.
"You damn well were. What were you two thinking?"
"We were thinking," Lung Nu said, "that we would obey your command."
"I never told you to attack Shiro!"
"You told us to do what we wanted," Frank said. "We've wanted to do this for a very long time."
"And if the Guan Yin That Was had wanted it settled this way she'd have done it! Don't try to tell me you two didn't understand her wishes!"
"There are mysteries," Frank said righteously, "even to the Enlightened."
"I can see," Jin said very slowly and distinctly, "that I'm going to be much more careful of what I say around you two. Shiro, listen, I -- " she began, but there was no one to talk to. Shiro had vanished.
"Blast it, he got away," Lung Nu said.
That was plainly true. Jin checked the cord on her wrist, but she didn't really need the glance of the Third Eye to know what she already knew -- the cord was broken once more. What she still didn't understand was why it was there in the first place. And why, specifically, was it there when Shiro was in trouble? The time it had happened before, Ling and Frank were with her; it couldn't have been them. Was he threatened then, or --
Jin remembered the way Shiro had looked at her before she'd stopped her servants. That wasn't love in his eyes then, that was anger. Betrayal. Hurt.
Cause and effect. That's karma, Jin thought grimly. She looked at Guan Yin's servants. She no longer really thought of them as hers.
"Did you two tell Shiro you were here on my command? And get down here; I'm getting a stiff neck looking up at you!"
Frank had actually looked embarrassed, but Ling didn't bat an eyelid, even after she had reverted to human form and floated down to hover just over the spines of the mountain.
"Of course we did, Immanent One. It was the truth," she said.
Jin sighed. "Maybe, but you stretched it almost beyond recognition. If that's not lying its close enough."
"Immanent One -- " Frank began but Jin held up a hand.
"Right now my foot hurts, my head hurts, I'm tired and I'm thoroughly pissed at the both of you. I'm sure you can justify your actions nine ways from Sunday but I just don't want to hear it, ok?"
Ling and Frank kept a sullen silence while Jin tried to think about what had just happened. From a human perspective it made perfect sense; such a betrayal would give any human being second thoughts about their beloved, if not convert that love directly into hate.
Jin smiled.
Cause and effect. No more and no less.
Frank frowned. "Immanent One, may one ask why you are smiling?"
"Why do you want to know?"
"Because it frightens me," Frank said grimly and Ling, for all that Jin could tell, seemed to agree.
"Take me home," Jin said. "And I promise I'll stop."
(())
Chapter 25
Stopping smiling was the easy part. Jin spent a big part of that afternoon in her kitchen with her violated foot in a tub of hot water and rock salt, and even longer after that sitting on the couch with her foot bandaged and elevated on a throw pillow as she went back to her neglected books. After a while she remembered why she'd stopped her studies in the first place; her head was in almost as much pain as her foot.
Jin hadn't forgotten how simple it all was at heart: Whether it was called the Divine Consciousness or Nirvana or Heaven, it was all the same. Everyone started as part of it and everyone now separated from it for whatever reason and trapped in the Cycle of Death and Rebirth was just trying, no matter how clumsily, to get home. Yet she knew one case where it emphatically was not true.
Shiro.
TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH.
Jin blinked. There was no one else there. A quick glance with the Third Eye proved that, but Jin could not escape an extreme sense of presence. A familiar one in fact.
"Guan Shi Yin. Look, we've both been on this page a dozen times or more. Either tell me what I need to do or get out of my head."
NOT POSSIBLE ON EITHER COUNT, JIN, BUT AFTER ALL YOU'VE BEEN THROUGH, I THINK I CAN AT LEAST TELL YOU WHY ON THE FIRST ONE. SO. WOULD YOU LIKE THAT?
"What about the second one?" Jin asked.
Jin could almost picture the Guan Yin That Was smiling. IT'S LIKE TEACHER SAID: EITHER YOU ALREADY KNOW THAT OR YOU'RE AN IDIOT. AND YOU ARE NOT AN IDIOT.
"Hard to prove by the mess I've made of things so far," Jin said, rubbing her eyes, "but I'd be glad for a bone, a scrap, any hint at all."
DON'T BE SO DRAMATIC. WHATEVER HAPPENS NEXT, I'M PROUD OF YOU, JIN. I JUST WANTED YOU TO KNOW. BEING BORN AGAIN AS YOU WAS WORTH THE RISK.
Jin actually blushed, but quickly recovered her composure. "That's nice, but what's your point?"
JUST THAT LOVE, IN KARMIC TERMS, IS TOUGHER THAN FEAR, ANGER, AND OBSESSION ALL ROLLED TOGETHER, AS YOU'RE JUST STARTING TO DISCOVER. THE FACT IS THAT I COULDN'T DEFEAT LOVE, JIN. NOT AS Guan SHI YIN OR THE MORTAL GIRL THAT MARRIED SHIRO IN THE FIRST PLACE. BUT YOU CAN.
Jin tried to let that last bit sink in. "But... why me? And why won't you tell me what to do, blast it?"
BECAUSE, BLAST IT, IF I TELL YOU WHAT TO DO, YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO DO IT. LOOK, I KNOW THAT'S A PARADOX, BUT FORGET IT FOR THE MOMENT. THINK OF SHIRO. YOU KNOW HE REFUSES TO MOVE ON. WHY?
Jin frowned. "Why? He's in love with me!"
GRANTED. BUT WHY NOT MOVE ON? HE'LL ACHIEVE ENLIGHTENMENT, AND THE TIME WILL COME WHEN ALL THE WANDERING ONES HAVE RETURNED AND THERE IS NO MORE NEED FOR Guan Yin, OR HELLS, OR ANYTHING. HE'LL BE WITH US FOREVER.
"Together in spiritual harmony or whatever is not the same thing at all as being alone with the one you love, and you know it."
SURE I DO. SO WHY DON'T YOU?
Jin felt as if a door had closed, and the sense of presence was gone. Not that Guan Yin was really gone. Jin knew better. But for now Jin was as alone in her own head as it was possible to be at the moment.
She didn't think she'd learned anything particularly useful, but the conversation did get her thinking about Shiro, and progress toward transcendence. Jin thought again about the Golden Cord, and the precise moment it had appeared, linking her to Shiro. Jin frowned as she considered an entirely new possibility. Maybe she wouldn't have to convince him to move on. Maybe all she had to do was be in the right place and time when the link formed again, when, despite himself, Shiro was vulnerable.
When his spiritual ass belongs to Guan Yin.
Jin wasn't certain that what she had in mind was possible, but she was certain enough that it was worth a try. All she had to do was be present and in place when the link formed, as it eventually would. She had two choices there: she could either follow Shiro the way he had been following her, which seemed nearly impossible on the face of it. Or...
Or I can make the link happen.
Jin sighed. The devil was always in the details. Jin yawned and swung her legs over the edge of the couch. She put weight on the injured foot before she remembered and grimaced in anticipation, but it wasn't so bad as she'd feared. Jin laced on her sneakers and tried the foot again. It was tender still and Jin knew she wouldn't be running any marathons any time soon, but the foot was serviceable enough, so long as she put most of her weight on her uninjured left foot and didn't mind limping a bit.
It did occur to Jin that this might be Shiro again, but even if it was and especially in her current condition, there was no way she could catch him before he'd managed to shake off whatever transient state of mind or emotion was making him vulnerable. Jin followed the thread out of the front door. It was late afternoon, but there was st
ill an hour or two of daylight. She paused to lock up and then continued to follow the thread in as brisk a walk as her condition allowed. This time when she reached Pepper Street the thread pulled her to the right, toward the courthouse.
This one's in Medias, whoever it is.
There were patrol cars in evidence, something you didn't see so much on the far side of Pepper Street. The courthouse itself was Greek Revival, modeled on some of the more posh antebellum mansions in Natchez. Jin walked past the portico and went through the metal detectors at the main entrance. An armed guard checked her bag and then sent her through. She paused for a moment by a directory. She'd been there once or twice for jury duty so everything was at least vaguely familiar, but it wasn't a place she thought about much. She was near a bank of two creaking elevators and the central stairwell. Upstairs were the actual courtrooms and the DMV was down the hall. The golden cord pulled down. Jin blinked. What was downstairs in the basement? She checked the directory.
Prisoner holding cells.
Jin glanced at the creaking elevators and took the stairs. Her foot was still a bit tender and she moved slowly. There was a guard station at the bottom. A bored-looking young man with thinning hair glanced up at her. "May I help you, Miss?"
Jin hesitated, glanced around, then checked the cord. She was definitely not there for the guard; the cord looped past him and through a door of iron bars to the holding cells beyond. "Oh, sorry," she said finally, "I must have taken a wrong turn. Is the DMV on the ground floor?"
"At the end of the hall."
Jin thanked the guard and went back up the stairs, slowly. She had never come across a situation where she couldn't reach the person that was ready to move on from their current hell. There was one case where said person had given her the slip -- Shiro -- but that wasn't the same thing.
Jin knew she'd have had to call on Lung Nu and Shan Cai sooner or later for her strategy against Shiro, but she'd hoped to put off calling on them in any capacity for a while longer. Jin glanced around; there was a fairly steady stream of people going about their business, including the occasional uniformed bailiff or police officer, but followed the hallway until she found an alcove to one side of a portrait of the governor. She looked around quickly to make certain there was no one in sight at that moment, then summoned Frank and Ling. Just after she did so she realized in horror that she hadn't specified their appearance, but they appeared in their standard human attire.
All the Gates of Hell Page 24