The Hidden Blade

by Sherry Thomas

  Ying-ying leaped back from the window. Wildly she looked about the room. But there were no real weapons. The swords, the steel fans, and even the poles were always put back in their secret places under the storeroom kang. She grabbed a handful of copper coins that she had been using to practice extinguishing candles at ten paces.

  In the courtyard, Amah fired a burst of needles, barely visible in the light of the half-moon, at the man. He cartwheeled to the left. Amah flung a second cluster, forcing him right, while she launched a third stream to catch him in the middle. He leaped high in the air, somersaulted, and landed without a scratch.

  “Is this all you can do, mending my shirt?” He laughed coldly.

  The next moment he unsheathed a cruel-looking broadsword only a little shorter than Ying-ying and bounded headlong onto the shadowy walkway where Amah had hidden herself. Ying-ying squinted and saw two flashes—Amah had pulled out her twin swords.

  The weapons chinked, clanged, and sometimes braced in silence while the two contested their strength. One moment Amah would jump onto the low balustrade to attack her opponent from a greater height; the next they were circling a pillar. It was obvious Amah hoped to stay under the walkways—she had the advantage of knowing the courtyard better in the dark. But it was equally obvious that her enemy was cunning. He continually framed his thrusts and hacks to force her out in the open, where it was brighter, and where, other than the willow tree, there was nothing for her to hide behind.

  Amah’s quickness astonished Ying-ying. Her swords slashed and wheeled like the wings of an iron eagle. The man, however, was as agile and skillful as she.

  And stronger.

  Ying-ying shook. She wanted to help, but she didn’t know whether she would make matters worse.

  They were now in the courtyard. The man wielded his broadsword freely, no more worries about it being stuck in a window frame or a pillar. Every opportunity he had, he swung against Amah’s left side, her weaker side. The crush of metal on metal jarred Ying-ying’s eardrums. The coins in her hands jangled.

  The coins.

  His next downward stroke sent Amah’s left-hand sword flying.

  Silently, Ying-ying came out her door.

  Amah saw her. She fought with renewed vigor, leading with her footwork so that the man had his back to Ying-ying.

  Ying-ying closed her eyes tight for a moment. Then she opened them wide and flicked her first coin. It caught the man squarely on the shoulder of his sword arm, right on the spot. His arm sagged, the broadsword falling from his hand. Without waiting, Ying-ying launched two more, hitting him on either side of his lower back, partially disabling his legs.

  Amah kicked him in the abdomen. He staggered back. Ying-ying struck him along points on his thighs and calves. He fell with a loud thump. Ying-ying sank to her own knees, breathing heavily, trying to remember in which room they kept the ropes.

  But to her horror, Amah advanced on the man and drove her sword through his heart. The man groaned and jerked, his right foot twisting and shaking as if possessed. After what seemed to be an eternity, Amah pulled her sword out and wiped the darkly stained blade on the man’s tunic.

  Ying-ying’s mouth open and closed uselessly. When she finally found her voice, her scream came out as no more than a vehement whisper. “Why did you kill him? I thought you taught me not to kill.”

  “I taught you not to kill lightly,” Amah answered coldly, even though her breaths, too, came in short bursts. “He is a bounty hunter. If I didn’t kill him, he’d have turned me in.”

  A bounty hunter? Ying-ying’s head spun. “There is a bounty on you? Why is there a bounty on you? Are you a…”

  Amah waited, as if daring her to complete her sentence.

  “You are a gambler, aren’t you?” Ying-ying’s voice rose with her anger. She had heard talk of what inveterate gamblers did. They’d sell their wives and children. They’d even sell their mothers. What was a little thievery then? “You steal things so you can gamble. And you got caught tonight.”

  Amah exhaled heavily. “I always said you were a clever girl.”

  “Not clever enough to know not to take up with you!” Ying-ying shot back.

  Amah laughed bitterly. “Of course I’m a fool for gambling. I don’t need you to tell me that. But stealing? I forgot to tell you. It’s what we do, those of us who belong to the Order of the Shadowless Goddesses. We are women who have no family, no husbands, no children. We don’t farm and we don’t embroider. How do you think we survive?”

  Ying-ying was speechless for a second. “You never told me I was joining a band of common thieves.”

  Amah stopped laughing. She let go of her sword. It fell to the paving stone with a clang. For a moment she stood motionless. Then she came toward Ying-ying. Ying-ying cringed a little, expecting to be hit. But Amah only knelt down and made to cup Ying-ying’s face in her blood-spattered hands. Ying-ying recoiled.

  Amah pulled back. Suddenly she looked much older. “You didn’t. I may have become a common thief, but that’s my own fault.”

  She slumped to her haunches. For a long time silence reigned. And when Amah spoke again, her voice was as Ying-ying had never heard it before, soft, almost dreamy. “You’ve never seen our secret abode in Mount Hua in the south. Such a beautiful place. Clouds floating in valleys, green-and-black peaks, waterfalls thin as threads that disappear into the mist. The locals built a shrine to us halfway up the mountain. Because when we sold what we stole—and we stole only rare and beautiful things worthy of our skills—we kept a small portion for ourselves and gave all the rest to those in need on the plains and the foothills, especially the women. They really believed we were benevolent goddesses.”

  “Is it still there? The abode?” Even though she’d prefer to keep a stony silence, Ying-ying couldn’t help asking. Amah had never before told her anything about her own past.

  “It probably is, but it was falling into disrepair even when I was growing up. When a house is five hundred years old and inhabited by people who didn’t like to fix roofs and walls, well, it’d go to pieces like that.”

  “Is anyone still living there?”

  Amah shook her head. “I was the youngest, the only disciple of my generation—the order had been in decline for generations. The others were already old women before I left. They must be dead by now.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  Amah closed her eyes. “I didn’t leave. I was expelled.”

  Ying-ying thought nothing else could surprise her. But this did. If Amah had been expelled from the order, then Ying-ying was not a legitimate member either. “Why?”

  “Because I took up with a man, and that was forbidden.” She wiped her hands on her tunic and glanced at Ying-ying. “You want to ask me where this man is now.”

  Ying-ying remained silent, the paving stones of the courtyard icy under her knees.

  “He was the first man I killed. I gave up my entire life for him. He loved me for six months, hooked me on gambling, and took up with another woman.” Amah paused, her hands balling into fists. “After that I fled to Shanghai, because no one knew anyone in Shanghai. I found work in a foreign devil’s house, your father’s, and that was how I came to know your mother.”

  Though Ying-ying had joked with Amah about hitting others and killing unfaithful lovers, she had only ever considered her study of martial arts as a matter of self-defense, so she could avoid a fate like Mother’s, of being passed around like chattel with no say in the matter. But now she saw that it was a double-edged sword. If Amah didn’t possess the skills she did, would she have undertaken all her dangerous and criminal deeds? And would Ying-ying become similarly careless when she grew up, trusting that she would be able to extricate herself from any peril, until she couldn’t?

  “Get up now,” Amah said. The moment of sentiment had passed; she had returned to her old, unemotional self. “We have to be rid of the man.”

  “Where?” Ying-ying demanded. They couldn’t throw him down a
neighborhood well and curse the water for the surrounding folk. Nor could they simply leave the body before the door of some courtyard or shop; that would be considered devastatingly bad luck for those within.

  “Doesn’t matter. First we get him out of here.”

  They fashioned a crude body bag from the burlap sacks that had held their supply of cabbages the previous winter. The man was heavy as a nightmare and turned corners most unwillingly. At every bump in the road, his skull made hideous noises against the cobblestones. Ying-ying jumped at every thud, convinced that all the night watchmen within a three-li radius must have heard.

  It was nearly dawn when they returned home. The courtyard itself had to be scrubbed clean of blood. Then Amah fed her clothes to the kitchen fire while Ying-ying crouched to the side, vomiting into a slop bucket.

  Amah handed Ying-ying a warm towel when Ying-ying had at last emptied the contents of her stomach.

  Ying-ying wiped her mouth. “That jade tablet—you stole it from Da-ren?”

  Amah said nothing. Was that why at one point she had been distracted before Da-ren’s visits? How many times had she gone to Da-ren’s residence before she found the jade tablet?

  “Would the bounty hunter have been so hard for you to handle if you hadn’t been injured over that theft?”

  Amah glared at her. “What are you going to say next? That I risked so much for something that hardly seems spectacular? You know nothing, girl. The jade tablet holds clues to the location of a great treasure—I heard Da-ren speak to your mother about it.”

  And that treasure would last Amah how long? Half a year of gambling?

  Amah had been the bulwark between Ying-ying and the more awful fates that could so easy befall an orphan girl, someone she could turn to even if Da-ren should abandon her altogether someday. But no more, now that she had shown the other side of herself, a gambling addict who would do anything to feed her habit, who could not be counted on to control herself even after she had sustained a life-threatening injury.

  Ying-ying got up slowly. Her legs were stiff and heavy; her heart seemed to weigh as much as the dead man they had left at a crossroads. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to Da-ren’s as soon as possible.”

  Amah passed a hand over her face. “I’ll go with you. I’m not safe here anymore.”

  “What?!” cried Ying-ying. “Are you going to bring bounty hunters to his place too? And what would happen when he finds out that you stole his prized possession? You’ll ruin everything for me. I won’t have you—”

  The slap came so hard that for a moment she could see nothing.

  “Shut up,” Amah said hoarsely. “I will ruin nothing for you. You will hate living at Da-ren’s residence. Mark my word. You will hate it.”

  Chapter 13

  The Foreign Devil

  “It’s…it’s…it’s such diminutive exquisiteness,” Ying-ying made herself say.

  The courtyard Da-ren had assigned to them was small, but hardly exquisite: four plain walls, a patch of packed earth, and a few unprepossessing rooms. It had nothing of the spaciousness and charm of her old home—no trees, no flowers, no gossamer-finned goldfish. A few chunks of rock, rejects from some artificial hill, squatted forlornly in one corner.

  “My amah is an expert gardener,” Ying-ying said to the majordomo, as Amah stood by silently. “She can put in some chrysanthemums now and in spring some peony bushes and maybe even a few cherry saplings. That is, if you will be so kind, Master Keeper Ju.”

  “I will see what the gardeners can spare,” the majordomo said coolly. “Now come with me to present yourselves to Da-ren.”

  Da-ren’s compound was large, and the enclosed courtyard set aside for Ying-ying was but one of a number inside. Some of the other courtyards looked as disused as hers, but a few were neat and pretty, dotted with dozens of potted plants, with round painted silk fans scattered on chairs, games of chess and go spread on tables under the eaves, and birdcages swaying gently from the latticework bracings of the walkway.

  Da-ren had no daughters, so those courtyards must be where his new concubines lived. She felt an ache for Mother. Had she been replaced in his heart? Did he love someone else now?

  They came to a garden near the northwestern corner of the compound. A fine-boned pavilion, set against a steep artificial hill slightly taller than it, perched at the edge of a lotus pond. Leading away from the pavilion was a miniature marble bridge that arched over the pond. Gold and silver koi glided lazily between lotus stalks. Long-legged cranes ambled beneath plum trees.

  The last of the water lilies had already bloomed. Only a few faded heads remained, their once pink-and-white petals brown and withered about the stems. Mother would have found this view a perfect tableau for a black-ink painting, A Scene in October.

  To complement the autumnal ambiance, a man sat in the pavilion, turning pages of a volume of poetry, a flagon of spirits on the round stone table before him, his face invisible behind a pillar.

  He must be a household scholar. All grand households hosted a number of them. They served as advisers to the master, tutors to his children, and general sycophants. Ying-ying would not have given him a second look had his shoes not caught her eye. They were made of shiny leather and had horribly stiff-looking soles, like those on the feet of the foreign devil in Mother’s photograph.

  She wanted a better look at the household scholar’s face. But now her view of him was entirely obstructed by the rock hill. As she progressed around the pond, following in the majordomo’s wake, gradually he became visible again. First his shoes, then his long, plain blue tunic, and at last his head.

  She stopped dead in her tracks. A real live foreign devil, with hair the color of straw! To say he looked like the man in the photograph was to say that she looked like Amah. But he looked more like that man than anyone else she had ever seen.

  She stared, unable to help herself. He glanced up and caught her gawking at him. She would have glared had she caught anyone staring so baldly at her. But he seemed to find nothing egregious or even noteworthy in her rabid attention. He nodded and turned his gaze back to his book, as if he could comprehend Chinese.

  Amah pulled on her. Ying-ying shook free and started walking again. But her eyes remained glued to the foreign devil, until she had gone through a moon gate into a different courtyard and an intervening wall once again obscured him from her sight.

  It became Amah’s turn to stand still. She scanned the courtyard, her face tense. But there was no one there and the courtyard, with its prolific jade-green bamboos and a meandering stream, appeared perfectly peaceful and contemplative, just the sort of environs one would expect for a gentleman’s study.

  Ying-ying was about to tug on Amah’s sleeve when understanding dawned. Was this where Amah had met the other martial-arts expert and became injured?

  Amah took a deep breath and resumed walking. Together they caught up to the majordomo.

  Da-ren’s study faced south, to take advantage of the light and warmth of the sun’s natural progress in the sky. The furnishings were spare and elegant: a writing desk, a few chairs, and Mother’s zither, which he had sent a pair of servants to fetch the day before Ying-ying and Amah’s move. On the north wall hung a large black-ink landscape, beside it two calligraphy scrolls bearing words that praised duty and love of country—Mother’s artworks, each of which bore the vermilion imprints of several of her personal seals.

  An intense relief came over Ying-ying: Da-ren might have new concubines, but Mother remained the love of his life. A moment later, a searing pain in her heart: He would always grieve for the one he had lost too soon.

  More than ever she wished she could comfort him.

  Along the east and west walls were intricately latticed shelves displaying rare and beautiful objects of jade, porcelain, and bronze. Each set of shelves was divided into four quadrants around a central niche. Notably, the central niche on the west wall was empty, as if Da-ren hadn’t quite found the item to cap his collect
ion.

  Or perhaps he had. Perhaps that was the place the jade tablet Amah had stolen had once occupied.

  Da-ren sat beneath a calligraphy scroll, reading a dispatch. He did not look up when they came in, and set aside the dispatch only after the majordomo approached him and, bent from the waist, informed him of their obvious presence.

  Ying-ying’s stomach tightened. When he looked at her, did he ever see her resemblance to Mother? Their faces were the exact same shape—and she had Mother’s brows and lips.

  She moved a step toward him and curtsied low. “This lowly maid has come to offer her humble greetings and deep gratitude to Da-ren.”

  “Rise,” he bade her.

  She obeyed, her head still lowered. Mother had drilled into her that women should be, or at least appear, meek and sweet-tempered. “Thank you, Da-ren.”

  Da-ren said nothing more for a while, until her neck was beginning to feel strained. From the corner of her eye she spied the majordomo leaving. Only when the man had gone beyond earshot did Da-ren speak again. “The great debt you owe your mother, you do realize?”

  “Yes, Da-ren.”

  “You are alive only because she was too soft of heart.”

  She quailed. He had to be referring to her brush with death as an infant, something that still made her shiver whenever she thought of it.

  “I cannot fault her for her kindness,” Da-ren went on, his tone severe. “But you were a constant burden to her.”

  Ying-ying’s ears rang. She had always wished Da-ren would speak directly to her, but she had not thought that when he finally did, it would be only to remind her that everyone’s life would be less complicated had she never been born, the bastard girl with no prospects other than becoming someone’s third concubine, and one whose temperament seemed certain to make a disaster even of that.