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by Scott Andrews

  “Kenji, hurry!”

  Before we could get back, it was almost over. As one, the two vengeful ghosts turned on the only survivor, who happened to be Master Rencho, lying whimpering on the ground not five paces from the golden statue. Kenji started muttering a sutra as best he could, but he was winded from running, and I knew it would be too late. I had no choice. I reached into my robe again and drew out, not the plaque, but my original safe passage.

  “In the name of the Emperor!”

  Loyalty had kept us safe so far. I prayed it would again. There was a moment when I feared that it wouldn’t be enough, that all was lost, but the two ghosts stopped a mere pace or two from their victim.

  I approached them, holding the symbol in front of me. “You know my authority. This man is my prisoner,” I said as I advanced. “Do not harm him.”

  The ghosts resumed their usual appearances, along with the sadness that had come with it­­—the sadness I had felt at our first meeting with them. It was more overwhelming than even their fury, and I was not certain how long I could bear it. If I was right about what I was about to do, then none of us would have to bear it, ever again.

  “It’s over,” I said to them. “The last item your master left behind has been recovered and will be returned to its rightful place. This I promise as a faithful servant of the Emperor. Your duty is discharged.” I kept my own doubts out of my mind and spoke with the certainty of command, of right, and then I held my breath.

  “Onegai. . . . Please. . . .”

  It was the first time either of them had spoken. Both women reached out toward me, not in threat but in entreaty. At first I didn’t understand what they were asking, but then I realized what they wanted and I remembered to breathe again. I took the Fujiwara mon from my robe and held it out. “Go in peace and take this token with you, as proof of your devotion.”

  They both put their hands on the bronze, and it floated away from me. In another moment they and the plaque had vanished.

  “I guess we won’t need your services after all, Kenji-san.” I walked over to Master Rencho and kicked him, hard. “Stop your gibbering, man.”

  The pain seemed to bring the man’s mind back into focus. Now his mind appeared to be focused on the tip of my tachi, which I was currently pressing into the hollow of his neck. “If I spare your life, will you promise to return to your temple and become the monk you’ve pretended to be? The temple will need new residents.”

  He licked his lips. “I swear.”

  “Then go.”

  Master Rencho didn’t need a second invitation. He scrambled past the bloody rags that were all that remained of his followers and disappeared into the night.

  “Now you’re trading insanity for foolishness,” Kenji said. “Do you honestly believe that creature will mend his ways? Most likely he’s running back to Uji to find more men!”

  “Likely? I’m counting on it. He will return in force, but not nearly soon enough to catch us. We will travel east through the woods until we reach the Iga barrier, then north. We can pick up the east-west road in a day or two without difficulty.”

  Now Kenji blinked like some night creature that had been thrust too suddenly into the light. “Counting. . . ?”

  “Master Rencho knows we’ve found the ‘treasure’ because he saw it with his own eyes. Unless I misjudge the man, within hours the entire village of Uji will know. Within days, the entire province and beyond will know.”

  “And?”

  “And they will return to this place looking for us. We won’t be here, of course. Neither will the ghosts.”

  Kenji looked around, frowning. “Are you sure they’re gone?”

  I was. There was no trace of their heavy melancholy about the place now. What sadness remained, as always, was my own.

  “Quite sure. So the good people of Uji will be free to tear the remnants of this place apart, for all anyone cares. They won’t find anything. And no one else will come here to die. Or for any other reason.” I closed the lid of the box and picked it up.

  “The Emperor sent you, alone, to destroy those bandits?!”

  I smiled. “Hardly. I was sent to retrieve this item just as I told you. Nor did the Emperor send me here. I was, however, acting in his name. Not the same thing. You weren’t supposed to know that, by the way. If you tell anyone, I will kill you. I mean that.”

  Kenji looked serious. “I know you do, so if it’s my death to speak, then I will know the full story of what I am not speaking about,” Kenji said. “Who sent you?”

  “Princess Fujiwara no Ai.”

  For a moment Kenji just stared at me. “The Empress?!”

  I shrugged. “Yes, but more to the point: a direct descendent of Governor Fujiwara no En.”

  “Lord Yamada, everyone knows that Princess Ai is proud, vain, and of most disagreeable temper. Are you telling me that she sent you out of the charity of her soul to lift the curse on this place?”

  “Of course not. She knew of the statue’s existence, doubtless from a family tradition, and she engaged me to try and fetch it. I fear it was my idea that the statue’s removal could be the means to break the curse. Princess Ai could not have cared less. For my part, the plight of those two wretched spirits perhaps clouded my better judgment.”

  “Then what you showed the two ghosts. . . ?”

  “. . .was the Imperial mon, the symbol of the Emperor. Against such authority, even their original master would bow. As attendants still in faithful service, they did the same.”

  I removed the golden image from the box and casually tossed it to Kenji, who let go of his staff as he struggled to catch it.

  “Lord Yamada, are you really insane—” He stopped. He held up the statue, feeling its weight, or rather lack of, in disbelief. “This isn’t gold!”

  I smiled. “No, it’s gilded wood. A fine carving well-protected by the stone shrine, but a simple devotional image and no more.”

  “And the rumors of treasure?”

  “Rumors only, probably fed by the presence of the ghosts, who were obviously guarding something. No one knew of the statue, save a few members of the Fujiwara family, the two unfortunate ghosts, and that pitiful youkai. But, thanks to Master Rencho, soon everyone will know of it. They will tell stories of the marvelous golden statue plucked from the ruins of this place. They’ll know it’s no longer here and thus not seek it. And even if rumors of treasure persist those who come here will find nothing, suffer nothing save wasted time. I have completed my mission. And the curse on the Mansion of Bones is lifted. In all respects.”

  “And the bandits?”

  “At first I felt guilty for tricking the ghosts into dealing with them for us, but that was foolish of me. I was forgetting that the bandits of Uji were the physical and spiritual descendants of the people responsible for the ghosts’ suffering in the first place. What I did was no trick.”

  Kenji scowled at the carnage around us. “No? What would you call this then?”

  “A reward for devotion beyond the grave?” I smiled a grim smile. “No, Kenji-san. I call it justice.”

  ~ ~ ~~ ~

  Richard Parks lives in Mississippi with his wife and a varying number of cats. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, and numerous anthologies including Year’s Best Fantasy and Fantasy: The Best of the Year. His third story collection, On the Banks of the River of Heaven, is due out from Prime Books in 2010.

  THE MATHEMATICS OF FAITH

  Jonathan Wood

  THEY LOCK ME AWAY with everything I could need except an exit. As they brick up the door of my Pater’s apartment they tell me that if I prove my own blasphemy to be truth then that will be consolation enough, and I see the laughter in their eyes. My Mater stands with them, imploring me to rescind my work, to claim failure, and to embrace the incorrect.

  “A prayer,” she begs, “a single prayer and they will forgive you.”

  But I refuse, my lips sealed. The truth does not c
ompromise. It can be ignored by others, it can be buried under lies and mysticism, but it still will be, and I will not partake in its obfuscation.

  I am fortunate that my Pater lived comfortably. I have been permitted to keep all that he willed to me. My own belongings are lined up along the central hallway, as I requested. The rooms have, of course, their own supply of water, which in turn feeds the vegetable garden. Certain lab animals in my possession will breed fast enough to allow for occasional consumption. I certainly will not starve, unless it be for company.

  My first task is one of organization. Most of my Pater’s furniture remains (except for his dining set, which is unsuitable for laboratory purposes) and a couple of his other accoutrements: his gramophone is superior to mine, for example, and I also find a projector and several boxes containing decks of filmcards, which I hope will pass some of my more lonesome hours.

  I decide that my Pater’s former bedchambers will suffice as a storage room for now. It is undeniable that I will need to sleep, but I am not yet able to regard that disease-ridden deathbed as a place to rest.

  I awake early on the morning of the first day, ready to resume my experiments. I spend the morning reviewing my notes and writing a summary in a fresh journal:

  Life is equal to the sum of behaviors we can perform and the time we have allotted to perform them. Let us call life L, time T, and behavior B. Thus, L=f(B,T), where f(B,T) is the relationship between behavior and time. If L=TB, then T=L/B and one could simply increase T by decreasing B. However, experiments with severed spinal cords and brain lesions have proved this implausible.

  Experiments involving the forced activity of several species have also shown L=T/B (and therefore T=LB)to be equally unlikely.

  Therefore, f(B,T) must be a more complex relationships. I now suspect that increasing or decreasing some subset of B, designated bx, will extend T. Identifying possible values of bxis the next step I must take if I am to discover how to increase T indefinitely, and achieve immortality.

  A day’s research reveals the most common behaviors of my subjects to be: breathing, eating, digesting, urinating, excreting, sleeping, walking, fornicating, procreating, dying, decaying, mewling, being trod upon, blinking, and staring. The latter seems to be the most prevalent. I then draw up a schedule whereby I can experiment by enforcing or depriving my subjects of one of these experiences (excepting death and decay) and recording their subsequent life span and susceptibility to the forces of entropy.

  It is around this time that I learn to use my Pater’s projector and begin to make my way through his decks of filmcards.

  It would be a compliment to describe the majority of these stories as facile. The action is stilted in the extreme, men and women adopting ridiculously stylized poses in order to simulate the extremes of emotion. I can only assume this is to ensure that even the most dimwitted of audiences is capable of following the limited action, which almost invariably consists of a woman dressed in so many layers of flimsy garb that she appears to have been attacked by particularly vicious fog, falling in love with one man and being preyed upon by another. The desired lover is universally handsome and well-dressed. The undesired lover is either swarthy or unhealthily thin. Undesirables are also frequently identified by an elaborately groomed moustache. The desired lover is unaware of the dangers posed by the undesired lover until the last moments of the action, when the poorly clad woman is at his less-than-tender mercies. Everything is then quickly resolved by the means of a swift blow to the jaw.

  Still, they pass the time.

  My Pater’s collection of filmcards is so extensive that is only after several weeks that I find a deck that has any merit whatsoever. It is after the death of a promising young guinea pig, whom I had dubbed Mathilde, which has put me in something of a fugue. I view these black moods as one of my most profound weaknesses. They are symptomatic of doubt and I must not doubt the truth, only forge towards it. Doubt clouds the mind and leads to such fallacies as religion and a love of the fantastical. However, seeking solace, or at least distraction, I turn to my Pater’s filmcards.

  I pull a deck at random, lower the gas lamps, slam the cards into the projection slot, and begin to disconsolately crank the handle. Immediately the dynamo begins to turn in the projector and its lamp-glow lights the screen. A moment later a woman’s face fills the space.

  I cannot accurately describe what it is that the woman’s face causes to happen inside the confines of my skull. However, the outward effect is that I stare. There is something captivating about the turn of her eyelashes, the downward slope of her cheekbones, the prominence of one earlobe appearing from behind a thick swash of hair. There is neither sadness nor joy in that face; she simply stares.

  This look so affects me that I pay little attention to the opening scenes of the film. It seems to match the norm, except that the woman’s dress is less ethereal than most, and closely mirrors the garb of a priestess. As if to make up for this concession to realism, the villain is even more stereotyped than is usual. He is emaciated in extremis; dressed purely in black, with a battered top hat that exaggerates his height, and a long, waxed moustache that he twirls incessantly.

  It is only after the first quarter of the narrative that I notice further oddities. For a start, the desired lover has yet to appear. Secondly, the nature of the villain’s advances is portrayed in a startlingly graphic manner. While I do not see him physically touch the priestess, his desire is portrayed to an extent that tests the limits of taste.

  At the narrative’s halfway point comes a scene that shocks me so much that I momentarily stop turning the projector’s handle. The villain has so engineered events that he and the priestess would be left alone. The scene closes with him advancing in a menacing manner that would seem parody were the priestess’s fear not so palpable. The next scene shows her hair and clothing in disarray as she weeps into her hands. This is not the exaggerated bawling that I have seen played out so many times before, but real tears of tragedy that slip between her fingers and seem to soak the very wall onto which her image is projected. I tell myself that my conclusions must be mistaken, but in the very next scene my fears are confirmed: she shows the clear profile of a woman in the early stages of pregnancy.

  My jaw hangs. The scene had been artfully constructed so that nothing was truly seen, but still the actions implied are so shocking as to test the limits of belief.

  After a moment’s pause I begin to turn the projector’s handle with renewed haste.

  The priestess, unable to hide the pregnancy for long, is locked away in a similar manner to myself, for her presumed sins, for her infant conceived without the sanctity of marriage. I wait, watching, my heart in my mouth, for her hero to appear and to rescue her. For ten long minutes I watch her pace empty rooms, watch her belly swell, watch as no-one comes to save her. Her only companions are two canaries, one little more than a chick.

  The final scenes leave me breathless. The priestess’s condition enters its final stages, and, though she hammers at the portals of her sealed chambers, no-one comes to her aid. The artist responsible for the narrative cuts his scenes faster and faster, becoming more and more metaphorical. We see her eyes tighten in pain; a shot of the two birds, both young and old, silhouetted against a gas flame; the woman’s hand clenching her bed sheets; the gas flame flickers; the woman’s hand relaxes; the young canary sitting alone on its perch, its older companion nowhere in sight.

  The film closes on the face of a newborn child. It does not cry or fuss as would most of its peers. It simply regards me from the screen with the same expressionless visage that its Mater had held at the outset of the tale.

  My heart pounds. This is it? The hero has not come. The villain has not been punished. And the priestess? She dies in childbirth. The shot of the lone canary seems to carry the message clearly and yet I cannot quite believe it. I remove the filmcards from their exit tray and replace them in the feed slot. I turn the handle again. The poor woman’s fate plays out before me on
ce more and this time it is undeniable: she dies alone, her persecutor unpunished.

  I am obsessed by the narrative. My work suffers. I forget to feed my animals and several of the mice turn to cannibalism (I am aware enough to note that this in no way increases their lifespan). I find myself leaving my study to watch the priestess’s fate over and over. My once dreamless nights are now haunted by the woman’s staring face. It is not exactly that she is beautiful, because she is not, but rather it is some tragic empathy inscribed into her features that fastens my gaze.

  There is also the matter of our parallel fates. I cannot help but notice that we are both unfairly imprisoned in the same manner. We both go on with no hope of rescue. And then? She dies, her suffering invalidated, her only heritage a doomed infant.