The House of Life 3

by Vann Chow

  Maide chimed in, “Mistress, your hardships have paid off. We have brought back a great gift from Gautama Buddha,” he stood up and presented Elise an ancient sutra with two hands.

  “What’s this ‘mistress’ nonsense?” Elise asked. “The two of you have been calling me that since you came back!”

  “You have saved our lives,” Maide replied, pushing the book of sutra forward once more and bowed his head to Elise in deference. “Moreover, you’re betrothed to our young master. We should refer to you with the proper title.”

  “Betrothed?! By whom?”

  “Master Siu, of course, by the authority vested in him by the Emperor of Heavens as the Regional Celestial Court Supreme Judge,” Jade who was serving tea to the group reminded her. “It’s all predestined, mistress. Your relations with our master was written on the Book of Love.”

  “The Book of Love? There is not only a Book of Life and Death, but also a Book of Love?”

  “The Book of Yin Yuan,” Jade said. “You must have heard of it from Chinese folklores, the Journey to the West and the likes.”

  “I have heard of it, of course,” Elise huffed, “but it actually exists? I cannot believe it. What does it say exactly about us?”

  “Young master is an immortal, so there is no entry for him,” Jade explained, “but yours…” she smiled naughtily at her then at the crowd.

  “Now that’s a juicy story I want to hear. Please go on,” Chad urged.

  “Your entry describes a relationship between you and a powerful and handsome Celestial official.”

  “Is there not a name of the guy on it?” Chad asked.

  “Who needs a name? Young Master has already asked for Elise’s hand and been granted his wish.”

  “I…” Elise stared at Michael in disbelief, wanting to say that she didn’t agree to the marriage proposal, but she thought matters like this are best reserved for private moment between the two of them.

  “Congratulations!” Chad said, “I’m sure Ian will be devastated,” he smirked. “I can’t wait to tell him! Ha ha ha!”

  Elise sat, upset, in silence as the group sent them their congratulations. Michael had, despite not being adept in reading human emotions, at least noticed her unease.

  “Come, let’s read the sutra together, Elise” Michael reached out for it and took it from Jade. “This is a great treasure, my dear.” He flipped it open and rays of light spilled out from its pages.

  “Is it some sort of Kung Fu manual?” Chad hunched over the sutra to take a sneak peek at it, at which point Michael snapped it shut.

  “I’m afraid this is only for the enlightened,” the young master said, which irritated Chad and elicited a series of grunting noise from him.

  “We saved your asses today, Ian and I,” Chad said, picking up the half-finished catapult once more from the ground. “Don’t you guys forget this.”

  “I won’t,” Michael replied with an air of authority. He was ready to grant them wishes that they deserve, but nothing more.

  Elise leaned closer to the book and lifted it out of Michael’s embrace. A quick flick showed a series of self-illuminating drawings on the left of different hand gestures, and explanations of them on the right. She saw beautifully drawn Sanskrit with English translation under each line. There were words like, ‘Abhaya Mudra – Gesture of Fearlessness’ and ‘Agni Mudra – Gesture of The Fire’ on it.

  “I’m tired,” Elise said. “I’ll read the sutra another day.” She replaced the priceless book on Michael’s lap who cradled it like a precious newborn and bid her goodnight.

  Jade shuffled to her side and walked her mistress back to her room. Michael flipped the pages of the sutra. Despite having obtained such an important, sacred text from the Buddha himself which he would have the whole journey home through the sub-earth crust water tunnel to devour, he was pensive. The Hell Marines had been alarmed. Troubles would be waiting for them when they arrive in Hong Kong, he was sure.

  Way Forward

  “This is not fair!” Chad tried to vent his frustration at the others when they were left alone in the common room after the young master had retired. Feeling much more himself having inhaled the fume of the ancient relaxant, Ian could be seen flexing his arms and legs next to the collection of exotic dried sea animal and their shells of varying shapes and sizes, no doubt some kind of secondary medicine collections for the ship that was an extension of the Chamber of Life and Nutrition’s glory at sea, in the corner, listening to Chad whine. “Even Elise is getting super power, and not just one, but a book full of them. If we’re going to survive in this realm as part of the Celestial Army, shouldn’t we be able to protect ourselves with some sort of super-human powers? Or at least be taught spells to fend for ourselves?”

  “You can know the words for all the spells in the world and you’ll still not be able to exercise their intended powers if you’re not the rightful commander,” Noqai said.

  “Rightful commander? Is there a book again where the names of such selected individuals are recorded?” Chad rolled his eyes and asked.

  “I wouldn’t doubt the existence of such a book. Destiny is scripted for everyone and everything according to Heaven’s Will.” Noqai replied him sternly, polishing his blade. He had pulled out the impressive sword now in his hands from that of a fallen Mongolian General at the Fishing City battleground. He said he saw it from a mile away, its blade gleaming green under the hot sun of the central plains as if it was beckoning him, the new worthy owner it had been waiting for for over eight centuries. Chad snorted as the story of King Arthur and his Excalibur came into mind when Noqai told his story. How cliché, he thought dismissively.

  “If not spells, then give us some worthy weapons, you know? One that can slay dragons and slash spiders,” Chad said, throwing the mini-catapult Maide was teaching him how to make on the floor and fixed his gaze evilly at Noqai’s shiny new toy. Maide shook his head slightly at his impatient student.

  “One must earn your way to power. Nothing is just given without one first having to show his or her worthiness, as I have explained,” the older twin said.

  “Well, didn’t we all drink the rice wine inside the hulu and gained some sort of magical power? You can balance like a crazy Chinese circus man and talk to animals; Maide has exceptional memory and he’s really crafty with his hands; the Psychic can, well, see the future, even if just briefly; Skinny Bones can lift a hundred times his weight, and the Arsonist can set fire to anything he wants. What about the two of us? What can we do?”

  “Well kid, you haven’t been in the cave with us for three days. We have been experimenting and perfecting our powers for decades, if not centuries, in absolute isolation,” Skinny Bone commented, scratching his back while doing it, lifting his flimsy shirt to expose the racks of bones under. “You must go through the same. Finding your super power is like finding your talent. You must do so by trial and error. There’s no way around it. Determination and patience are required.”

  Chad grumbled.

  “And by the way,” Maide interjected, “talking to animals is not a super power. Like I said, it was practice. I lived and worked with hawks all my life. Things don’t just happen. It takes years of practice to perfect.”

  “But we don’t have time!” Chad said, throwing his hands up in the air. “We’ll just fight with our bare hands when Commander Zhizu and the Hell Guards catch up with us then when we arrive in Hong Kong. Did you not see how agitated Michael Siu was? We sunk a British ship given Celestial sanction to roam the Chinese waters. There’s bound to be trouble ahead.”

  “You’re quite right in assessing the situation,” Maide conceded. “We’ve better be prepared for the worst.”

  “It means you better start figuring out what it is that you can do really, really well,” the arsonist sneered at him on the side.

  “What is it that you can do really well?” The psychic asked him with a guiding question kindly, like a teacher trying to encourage a despairing student falling
behind in school.

  Chad put his face in his hand, frustrated. “Urghh, you know what the two of us do in our free time? We watch Netflix, we play basketball, and we make music. — I write lyrics and rap. Ian sings and plays the guitar. That’s what we do. That’s all we do!” Regretting deeply now why he hadn’t been more interested in something more useful in current circumstances like combative martial arts.

  “Rap?” Maide had never heard of this word before.

  “It’s a kind of music, fast-paced, powerful poetry laid on top of rhythmic beats,” Chad explained. Then seeing the dumbfounded expression on the Mongolian’s face. “Rap is an English word.”

  “The language of the barbarians the likes of Admiral Henry and Fritzmaurice,” Noqai explained to his brother. “Young master explained to me that the English came from an island in the North West, further than Khan’s armies had ever been, beyond the Golden Horde khanate.”

  Maide shook his head in disbelief. “What’s so special about this English poetry? Us Mongols have long admired the Song Chinese’s Si (poems) and Qu (opera music). Why would you go learn the inferior art forms of the barbarians?”

  “I don’t think you should call it that,” Ian spoke for the first time tonight, carefully watching Chad who was sure to get upset if someone as much as denigrate the divine art of rapping.

  “You have no idea…” Chad squinted at Maide and words started to spill from his lips in quick succession. They formed in his mouth and weaved themselves into a coherent story after an affecting rhythm as if driven by a divine power. “These dope ideas. They come and they flow and they cure amnesia. Lifted from Pangea, you thought you were in Alexand-ria, listening to Archimedes and his Eurekas, but it’s me, your panacea, the salvation that leads you to triumph from Britan-nia…”

  The group cheered, at least the part of the group that understood sufficient English to know what Chad was rapping about. Maide smiled, unable to decipher a single word from the lyrics but enjoyed the beat and nodded along in appreciation. Noqai frowned, but kept his mouth shut. It’s just a rhyme, he would have said, if he was more liberal with his tongue. But he wasn’t the kind of person to discourage others. It appeared that this modern, hot-headed boy in front of him did have some sort of passable musical talent. May he find his powers soon to save his life. Singing had never saved a man from slaughter according to his rather extensive life, and death, experience.

  Ian bobbed his head along to Chad’s freestyle. How he wished to have his guitar with him, or a harmonica. The voyage had given him inspiration. Music composition was forming on the edge of his consciousness. He felt a desperate need for an instrument to sound it out, or his head would explode.

  Then he saw it. It was a large — the size of a clenched fist — a shell of an unknown, tightly clasped together mollusk shellfish. Ian wasn’t sure that it had ever been opened. It just stood there, dried and covered in a layer of thin dusts on the display shelf. On its rugged, crusty black body, Ian could see a row of seven holes arranged from large to small on it. He put his lips closest to the largest hole and blew. A clear note bellowed out of its vibrating shells. It made a hypnotic, indescribable sound that electrify his whole being. Soon he shuffled his lips up and down the body of the shell with familiarity that came from nowhere, making a perfect tune to Chad’s rap. The group marveled at the boys.

  “Wine!” Maide said, “you can’t have good music and not have wine!”

  ***

  “The prisoners are making such a ruckus!” Madame Siu hissed, “Jade, go and tell them to shut up!” She was filing her nails and dusting the powdery ashes coming off them all over the floor from the height of the bunk bed above Elise’s. The scrapping noises it made even more irritating than the sight of the dead woman’s enamel. Elise furrowed her brows in disapproval, but decided not to utter her disgust out of leniency. This incredibly vain woman was supposed to go back to her punishment by eternal hell fire just four days from now when the Yulan festival celebration ends. Perhaps she should give the woman some credits for staying so unbelievably calm. Would Madame Siu have passed the Buddha’s test? She wondered.

  Jade heard her mistress’s order and got up from the wine barrel that she was sitting on. The crew had fished a dozens of them from floating out of the Imperieuse’s wreck and did not let them go to waste. Most of them were kept up there with the boys in the common room, but some of them have been sent to their suite for the lack of storage space since the cellar was occupied.

  “Just let the boys be,” Elise said. “They’re going to face trial soon, am I right?”

  Jade stopped and looked at her mistress. “You need not worry about them. They are not your friends.”

  Elise thought about what Jade said. She was right. It was not her fault they got transported into the realm of the dead, just as her death was nobody’s fault. But no, there was something more in Jade’s eyes when she said that they were not her friends. There was an unmistakable look of distain. She wanted to know why.

  “Rest, miss,” Jade insisted, and tugged her in bed. “You should rest.”

  Bus

  “Young Master, I’m so glad you’re back!” a man dressed as a butler, also a sub-unit commander of the Hong Kong Celestial Court military troop put in charge of the defense of the Chamber of Life and Nutrition while Michael was away, fell in steps with him as he walked down the gangway onto the dock. “You’ve come back just in the nick of time.” He looked up at the century-old red brick and granite clock tower at the ferry pier. It was forty-three minutes to midday.

  “The Chamber of Life and Nutrition has been ransacked again while you were away. Wuzha Sam arrived with his men during our festivities and stormed into the Chamber, demanding the Book of Life and Death. Our spirits guests have been purged from the chamber and are now scattered everywhere in Hong Kong. It was chaos everywhere in both worlds!”

  Michael feared something bad might have happened when he returned to Hong Kong, but he didn’t guess the culprit correctly. Nearby, two automobile crashed into each other. The drivers stormed out of their cars and started throwing punches at each other. The traffic behind them from both sides locked into a standstill. A fire broke out from the fourth floor of the Pennisula Hotel directly ahead. Guests, screaming, were streaming out of the hotel onto the roads. Traffic police officers rushed around haplessly and tried to alleviate the situation. Sirens of an ambulance could be heard from not far away. Unoccupied spirits were flying all over. With no place to go now the Chamber’s festivities were interrupted, they roamed the Kowloon Peninsula looking for trouble. Some could already be seen crossing the Victoria Harbor to Hong Kong Island.

  “Wuzha had taken advantage of our weakened state after the last scrimmage and returned with an even stronger army this time. —Young Master, did you get any of our messages at sea, young master? I have sent our best pigeons out for you. None has returned.”

  “Messages?” Michael said, feeling a kick in his stomach. No doubt all of the Chamber’s best birds have now been shot dead by Commander Gerridae’s Hell Marines. “We have travelled by the ancient deep-earth waterways to avoid detection. There have been some unusual circumstances in our voyage… So no, I didn’t receive any of your messages. Tell me everything at once! What did Wuzha want from the Chamber again? He already has Elise’s diary…”

  “The Manchurian wants to have the sacred Book of Life and Death itself! But the Master has hidden it from him. When the devil couldn’t find it, he had his men burnt down our Grand Medicine Cabinet in a rage. We lost many catties of precious medicine, young master,” the man said with remorse, shaking his head. “In the chaos, Master Siu himself has been captured and he is now locked up in the Qing bandit’s nest inside the Kowloon Walled City for ransom. We have the whole Walled City under siege. Not a soul could get out, but also not a soul could go in. We have fought for two days but were unable to penetrate its walls without outright destroying it, which would surely bring detectable tremble to the human world. Wu
zha has demanded us to hand over the Book of Life and Death before noon today, otherwise, otherwise… Master, we don’t know where the Book of Life and Death is, and even if we do, we can’t hand it over to him. The troop is now waiting for your instruction on what to do!” He bowed his head, waiting for order anxiously.

  Michael stopped walking to look at his man in disbelief. “How could you let this happen!” He rumbled angrily, but eventually, he absorbed the information and calmed down. Briskly, he walked towards a black, classic Bentley waiting for him at Salisbury Road. The driver was holding the door open for him to step into the passenger seat with his left hand, while his right was fending off curious souls trying to come near the Celestial Court official vehicle.

  “Where’s Ken? Where’s Horsehead and Cowhead?” He asked his butler.

  “Young Master Ken and his men were only just recovering from injuries from the last conflict. They have spared no effort in the defense of the Chamber, but the enemy took advantage of the fact that you and your best Soul Reapers were out at sea to ambush us. The Chamber has suffered huge casualty.”

  “How many?”

  “Upwards of twelve hundred, I’m afraid…” he answered gingerly. “Including the five hundred we’ve lost in the last battle, our forces are down to the bare bone.”

  “Damnit!”

  “In any case, Master Ken and his men are with us. We have set up a temporary command center at a residential unit two miles South of the Walled City, together with two hundred of elite troop, mostly archers and shapeshifters in Master Ken’s regiment who sat out the last conflict due to their recent injuries. I have left the rest of the forces at the Chamber in case anything happens.”

  “What else can still happen? They’ve already burnt down our Grand Medicine Cabinet, the life blood of the Chamber!”