Beneath Ceaseless Skies #100

by Richard Parks

  “Which are?”

  “There is simply no possible way that a provincial censor could afford a work of art such as this by honest means. You must be taking bribes!” the counselor said as he continued to study the lion.

  Now Xu Jian was a little puzzled. Master Huang had been examining the piece closely for some time now, and yet, except to admire its artistry, he had not reacted to its presumed ghostly aura at all.

  “And you notice nothing... unusual, about the jade lion? Nothing at all?”

  “Unusual? Only its quality.”

  Xu Jian thought it very strange that a priest of Huang Ti’s reputation would not recognize the vessel for what it was, yet he clearly did not.

  He finally sighed. “Master Huang, you and I both know that wealth is not at issue here. The king himself could not buy a work of art such as this, because no others exist. It is very old.”

  “Then how did you acquire it?”

  “It belonged to my wife’s family, and it came to my household with her. It was sort of a dowry.”

  “And who is her family? What is their name?”

  Xu Jian thought about the question for a moment, but was finally forced to shrug. “Master Huang, I do not know. It never seemed important.”

  “Censor Xu, do you take me for a fool?”

  “I am an honest man, Master Huang, and so I will answer you honestly—I take you for an honorable man as well, doing your best to serve a king who is neither honest nor honorable.”

  “Now you speak ill of His Majesty? How dare you!”

  “I speak the truth,” Xu Jian said. “And I believe you still recognize the truth when you hear it. The king wants the jade lion, and one way or another I suppose he will have it. There is no reason to insult either me or yourself by pretending there is anything else to the matter.”

  “I have heard enough!” Master Huang turned to the guard. “Captain Fei, summon your men. Search the house and bring everyone you find here.”

  Xu Jian would have cursed himself for making matters worse, only he knew they were already about as bad they were going to get. If he could have neither happiness nor Lady Green Willow, at least he could speak the plain truth again. It wasn’t a trait that was especially valued in the normal functioning of his office.

  Captain Fei reappeared, accompanied by the three other soldiers, escorting Lady Green Willow and her two maids. Xu Jian knew they would find no one else, as all the other servants had been sent away that morning for their own protection. Patience and Wind Whisper appeared apprehensive, but Lady Green Willow held her head high, though she did bow when brought into Master Huang’s presence.

  “Is this everyone?” Master Huang asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Captain Fei said. His voice sounded a little odd to Xu Jian, though perhaps it was because he had hurried so. Master Huang turned to Lady Green Willow.

  “Your husband says that the jade lion belongs to you.”

  “He speaks the truth, though I share all that I have with my husband, so it is his as well.”

  “Was it a wedding gift?”

  “It was meant to be. Instead it was a funeral gift,” Lady Green Willow said frankly. “I was buried in it.”

  For a moment Master Huang just stared at her. Then he turned to Xu Jian. “Has your wife gone mad?”

  “My wife is also an honest person. She’s telling you the truth,” Xu Jian said. It was clear that his wife also saw no point in deception now. He then told Master Huang the story of how he had met Lady Green Willow and her maids, but he couldn’t fail to notice how Master Huang’s countenance was turning darker by the moment. When his story was done, he hesitated, then stated the obvious. “You don’t believe us, do you?”

  “Of course I don’t believe you!” Master Huang said. “I am a priest of the highest rank! Do you think I could be in the presence of spirits and not know this?”

  Xu Jian nodded. “I wondered about that. It was the main reason I tried to keep my family away from you. But you didn’t even recognize the jade lion for what it truly is—an ossuary.”

  “You’re all insane,” Master Huang said.

  “I assure you we are not,” Xu Jian said.

  “Feh.” Master Huang reached into a pouch on his belt, held up a small slip of paper covered in fine calligraphy. “Xu Jian, do you recognize this? As a scholar, surely you have studied the form?”

  Now Lady Green Willow did look apprehensive as Xu Jian answered him. “It is a ward against spirits.”

  “If you doubt my competence, please examine it closely.”

  Huang Ti handed the slip of paper to Xu Jian, who did as he asked. “It is very well done,” Xu Jian said. “I can see no errors in it.”

  “If you recognize that, then you should also know that it requires no great spiritual power on the part of anyone who wields it. I created it, but it would work even if someone such as you were to apply it. Is that not so?”

  Xu Jian, suspecting the priest’s intent, felt his knees tremble. Nevertheless, he spoke clearly. “I believe so,” he said.

  “I want you to place the spirit ward on your wife’s forehead.”

  “You can’t ask me to do that,” Xu Jian said, nearly shaking with fear and rage. “It would destroy her!”

  “I am not asking. I am ordering. Do as I say or I’ll have you and your entire household executed here and now. If she really is a ghost, then you’ll be the only one to die. Shall we test this?”

  Xu Jian’s fear diminished as his rage grew at Hunag Ti’s cruelty. His hand inched toward the dagger in his belt. In his desperation he thought that, if he moved quickly enough, he could take the priest hostage and use him to make their escape. If that failed, Xu Jian was determined to kill the man if it was the last thing he did on earth. He took one step, but he made the mistake of glancing at Lady Green Willow first, and she met his gaze and quickly shook her head.

  “Husband, do as Master Huang commands.”

  Xu Jian stopped where he was. Master Huang, perhaps suspecting trouble, had already taken a half-step behind Captain Fei, and the moment was lost. Xu Jian knew he could not possibly reach the priest before the soldiers struck him down. He turned to his wife.

  “I can’t.”

  She smiled at him. “It may be the last thing I ask of you, Husband, but I do ask. Please trust me.”

  The guards, at Master Huang’s prodding, had already drawn their swords. Tears formed at the corners of Xu Jian’s eyes, but he took one step and, as gently as he knew how, touched the paper to Lady Green Willow’s forehead.

  Nothing happened.

  After a moment or two the paper fell off and fluttered to the floor like a dead leaf in winter.

  “I have reason enough to relieve you of your duties,” Master Huang said. “To tell a king’s counselor such an obvious lie.”

  “But as a follower of the Way,” said Xu Jian, “you understand the nature of balance and imbalance. I have tried to correct that imbalance in Lady Green Willow, and this just proves that our treatment is working!”

  “It proves nothing, because there is nothing to prove. Lady Green Willow is a woman, like any other.”

  “Hardly like any other, but I can see that you’ve found your excuse. Declare me corrupt or unfit if you want. I can offer no defense save to repeat that we have told you the truth. You can seize us and the jade lion with perfect justification. Or....”

  “Or?”

  “You can let us go. The jade lion belongs to us, and we have done nothing wrong. You know this to be true.”

  Master Huang did not speak for several long moments. He finally shook his head. A bit reluctantly, perhaps, but firmly. “Captain Fei, you are to place Censor Xu in custody. All his property and chattels are forfeit to the king. See to it.”

  Captain Fei didn’t move.

  Master Huang scowled. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

  “Orders, Sir,” Captain Fei said.

  “I just gave you my orders!”

  “Not y
our orders, Sir,” Captain Fei said. He looked at Lady Green Willow, and his eyes were glowing red. “Lady Green Willow’s orders.”

  “Seize Master Huang,” she said.

  Before the priest could react, Captain Fei pinned his arms, and the other guards held their bronze swords against his neck. Lady Green Willow plucked the pouch containing other spirit wards from Master Huang’s belt and tossed it aside. “Now I understand why you did not recognize my nature, Master Huang,” she said. “But you must not be the priest you once were, or you’d have certainly recognized my friends for what they are. Has serving your king served you as well? I would consider this, if I were you.”

  For a moment Xu Jian was too surprised to speak. “I think your prayers yesterday must have been answered!”

  She smiled at him. “I wasn’t praying, Husband. I was sending for help. As you may recall from the repairs to our home, Patience and Wind Whisper are not the only ones who still serve me. But the delay was necessary, since my soldiers could not come to us before sundown.”

  “My Lady, what shall we do with Master Huang?” asked Captain Fei, or at least the spirit who bore Captain Fei’s appearance.

  “I will spare his life, but we need time,” replied Lady Green Willow. “Husband, with your permission?” Xu Jian nodded, and his wife turned back to the ghostly soldier. “Escort Master Huang to the cave where I used to reside, but otherwise do not harm him. Once that is done, you will all please consider your obligations to me and my family faithfully discharged. You are free, as I hope to be.”

  “Thank you, Lady Green Willow,” said the ghostly soldiers in unison, and they bowed to her.

  After the spirits had departed taking Master Huang with them, Xu Jian embraced his wife in happiness and relief. “You’ve saved us! I thought to kill Master Huang myself, but I am glad you didn’t. Perhaps he deserved it, but I believe he was a good man once.”

  “I am sorry that we must leave this place. Especially now,” Lady Green Willow said. She looked down at the spirit ward lying on the floor. She stepped on it, then ground it under her dainty heel. “As for Master Huang, he owes his life more to my gratitude than to my mercy.”

  “Gratitude? Why? He would have had me destroy you!”

  She smiled then. “But I wasn’t destroyed. I already knew that we... that I, was less and less connected to the spirit realm with each passing day, but I wasn’t able to convince myself that my progress had gone so far. Now I see that it has done so, and if I am simply a mortal woman now as Master Huang’s spirit ward proved, then I must be something else as well, something I hardly dared to believe, or to tell you for risk of false hope. That is why I am grateful to him.”

  He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Husband, I am pregnant.”

  * * *

  The accounts of Master Huang Ti’s mission to interrogate Censor Xu were a little unusual, to say the least, and were thus recorded years later along with many other strange happenings in a book called “Official Accounts of the Mysterious” compiled by the scholar Sung Man Hei. In that version, Master Huang’s guards were found unconscious by the remains of a villa called the Palace of the Jade Lion. The censor’s residence itself was no more than an old ruin, full of cobwebs and rats; it was obvious that no one had lived there in some time.

  As for Master Huang Ti himself, he reappeared several days later, dirty, disheveled, and muttering some nonsense about being trapped in an abandoned tomb. In deference to his delicate health, Master Huang was allowed to retire to a monastery in the south.

  The Provincial Censor and his household could not be located, though there were reports that a wealthy branch of the Xu family later established itself in the city of Xianyang in the state of Qin, whose ruler was far more intent on annexing his neighbors than in collecting art. Descendents of the Xu family, it is said, live in that area to the present day.

  As for the jade lion, it was never seen again.

  Copyright © 2012 Richard Parks

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Richard Parks lives in Mississippi with his wife and a varying number of cats. He collects Japanese woodblock prints but otherwise has no hobbies as he is, sadly, temporally challenged. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in 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, was released by Prime Books in 2010, and PS Publishing released his novella The Heavenly Fox last spring.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  RATCATCHER

  by Garth Upshaw

  The stone blocks lie tumbled and bollixy on the blasted earth and black moss covers them like scabs. I push my head a hair’s-breadth further out my crusty hole and flare my nostrils and sniff. Mossy trees and rotting ferns and stagnant water. No oil or coal or smoke. Good.

  “Come on out then. Lively like,” I hiss, and scuttle into the open. Moonlight casts pools of black shadow and clouds scud low.

  Ashera scrambles after me, eyes squinting and clearly painful and darting looks here and here and here. Like a sparrow in a roomful of cats.

  The dark clouds press down on my back like the threat of a butcher’s cleaver low and poised and ready and I tremble all shook up and skin tingling as if my clothes have been set aflame. “Hsst, then. Follow step for step, my darling daughter. You will be safe.”

  So we check my lines and traps and I am not called Ratcatcher in idle folly. I bait their lairs with gobbets of rotten meat or peanut mash though there is no excess of the latter what with the general scarcity and the great number of yaps to feed.

  My beautiful daughter steps lightly and surely after me and holds the lines and does not shirk from the killing and skinning, and I save their internal parts what is foul eating for people but quite usable for bait. My traps are clever constructions with no clockwork, of course, but they take a large slice of time with pliers and wire and a good candle for the close-in work and my eyes may not be what they used to be, but I am accomplished.

  We spend the night in a most productive and enjoyable way and by the time the light grows in the east and we have to make for one of my hidey holes, we have recovered two score rats and their skins hang off my belt in a thick gray mass and their meat is salted and wrapped and kept close-in and safe near my belly.

  My safe hole is dug in under a mound of stone and shattered wood and chips of colored glass that I fancy used to be a church. But I was quite young and the memory has been turned and worked so often in my brain that the edges are worn smooth and I am most sure that what remains bears little resemblance to what actually passed.

  But it is what I have and often a truth can be constructed from nothing but spiderwebs and moonshine anyway. I make a tiny fire from the store of wood I keep tucked away in the hole. The safe comfort of the earth drives me half mad with its closeness and oppressive dank and dark and roots and mud and I long to feel as safe and comfortable out of doors, but that is wasted thought.

  So I skewer half a dozen rats and soon the smell of roasting makes my mouth juices come on very strong and I have salt and mint leaves and a potato the size of my fist and an onion so ripe and pungent my eyes and nose stream and my whole face swims with anticipation.

  Ashera shows interest in my hazy recollections of the tall spire and the great mass of people all dressed in clothes so clean they sparkled in the colored light which fell through the room like giant spears of red and gold and green and blue and the cunning clockworks imbued with song so sweet you would swoon just hearing one short note, and she listens rapt with her head tilted sideways. But she is more desirous of those other marbles of memory that are polished to a high glossy sheen.

  “Tell me about my ma.” She licks the grease off her fingers. “Tell me about when you first laid eyes on her across the room. How you were smitten.” Her eye
s glow yellow in the firelight.

  So I do. The trade delegation from the Highlands with wool and thick warm sweaters and smooth planks of honey-colored hardwood had traveled a great long way and we were lucky to have them as we lived close in under the shadow. One member of their party had yellow eyes like fire and some laughed at me for they thought she was old and not so pleasing to the eye, but they lacked discernment, for she was smart and funny and lively and would not take an unfairness lying down or suffer a pontificating fool or see a hurt she did not wish to balm.

  She was named Emma and was an angel in my eyes and I laughed at my mates who were so blind and thick and we danced and told each other the little stories we all have growing up and it did not matter and we kissed and her lips were soft and her teeth were sharp.

  We were married by the end of the week and the highlanders went back to their cold mountain fasts richer with salt and salmon and metal scavenge but poorer by one and the trade seemed overweighted in our favor to me but Emma laughed and said she was no trade at all and that she were a free person and not a piece of furniture to be exchanged on a whim for a tub of butter. She kissed me again.

  Ashera’s eyes have closed and her light steady breathing shows that she has drifted off to slumberland and my thoughts turn darker for those days had been so sweet and short and like a dream where you wake all reluctant and try to roll over and fall back but you can’t and you can’t and you can’t and you have to wake up.

  There are clankers and buzzers out during the bright hours of the day. Clockworks doing their impenetrable workings but the hidey hole is safe and I much desire to drink myself into blackness with a flask of the grog I trade for with One-Arm Jelly. Good fermentation of berries or potatoes and he boils and boils and captures the essence with twists of copper line I scavenge for him.

  But I have my daughter with me and a man cannot live who loses his daughter due to insensibility or slowness of reaction and I have left the juice at home in a safe place. I shiver and sweat all day long and the sound of the clankers makes my blood boil with fury and despair and that is a most helpless kind of combination.