The Eleventh Tiger (25 page)

He had never felt so useless. Even as a child he could fetch and carry, or at least watch and learn.

He turned at the sound of footsteps to find the Doctor watching him. The old man’s face was inscrutable, but Fei-Hung thought he saw concern in the pattern of his features.

Then the Doctor stepped fully into the room, the light on him shifted and his emotions were a mystery again.

The Doctor sighed. ‘It seems you may have been right about that foolish man, Jiang.’

‘It wasn’t Jiang. Three-Legged Tham thinks it was men hired by Jiang, but I don’t know.’

Fei-Hung looked down at his hands again.

My
gungfu
skills have been of little use, and with hands like these, I can’t prepare medicines properly. If my father was here, it wouldn’t matter so much, but -’

‘I’m sure Master Wong is just as concerned about how you are, but he wouldn’t let it distract him from what he was doing, would he?’

‘My father? What has he to do with it?’

‘He is a difficult man to live up to, but he is his own man, as are you, young man. If you did your best, you can’t find yourself wanting. Now, let’s do something practical, hmm?

Can you describe these attackers?’

‘Not really. They were wearing cloaks and hoods.’

‘What about the one you fought? Could you not tell anything from being so close to him? Or even from his fighting style?’

Fei-Hung thought about this. It was natural for him to analyse the style of an opponent. He was glad the same thought had occurred to the Doctor. ‘He must have been wearing armour. Not Chinese armour, but steel-plate armour, like in your English stories.’

The Doctor frowned and looked off into the distance. ‘That’s very interesting, young man. And also very strange.’

‘He didn’t have much of a fighting style. It was very primitive and relied mostly on just taking punishment no matter what. But it’s not very easy to fight in armour.’

Despite the heat of the day, and the thick blindfolds that been wrapped around her and Vicki’s heads, Barbara was soaked in a cold sweat as she lay on the floor. With no clue as to the intent of the strong men who had carried them, her imagination had been more than happy to make suggestions of its own. If they intended simply to kill her and Vicki they could easily have done so at Po Chi Lam, but knowing this intellectually hadn’t stopped her stomach churning in anticipation of a blade.

If the men weren’t bent on murder, the next options her mind inflicted on her were rape or ransom or, possibly, simply leverage.

She struggled, trying to get to her feet, then winced and yelped as the knife that was cutting her bonds caught her hand. The hood was pulled from her face, and she caught a brief glimpse of several men as she looked around to see if Vicki was all right.

The younger girl was looking at her. ‘Are you all right?’

Barbara asked.

‘I think so,’ Vicki said nervously. ‘I haven’t anything broken, anyway. But I think I feel sick.’

The room they were in was large and high ceilinged, with a large dais in the centre. Four statues stood against the wall behind the girls, two flanking the door and one in each corner. They were life-sized soldiers, their bodies carved into the shape of padded tunics and leggings, and armoured jerkins. Their faces were astonishingly lifelike and all four were very individual. They hadn’t been merely pulled from a mould.

Three men were on the dais. The two who were standing wore leather armour over silks, with metal plates and studs set into the leather. One was huge and almost too muscle-bound to be real, the other was lean and mean-looking. Both had dark hair tied into topknots. The third man, sitting between them, was wearing fine robes over a well-cut tunic.

His hair was almost white, as was his goatee beard.

‘Welcome,’ the third man said.

Barbara recognised instinctively that these were the men Cheng had described, and that the one who had spoken was the abbot.

‘Just who do you think you are?’ she demanded.

‘Who am I?’ The abbot seemed amused. ‘I am the lord of this land. My name is Qin Shi Huangdi.’

Barbara could feel the blood drain from her face and the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. The words caught in her throat before she could get them out. ‘The First Emperor?’

‘There were others after me?’ He seemed to be struggling to think. ‘Yes,’ he said at last.

‘But the First Emperor died two thousand years ago.’

For a moment the abbot looked shocked, then he smiled.

‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘Yes, I did.’

Qin died.

He didn’t remember all of it. He didn’t remember meeting any of his family, or the bridge of jade, or even the white light he had heard his soldiers talk about after they were wounded. Maybe the living just weren’t meant to remember such things, or maybe the pain of being reborn scrambled it all up in his head.

Dying was easy. The coming back hurt like all hell.

Whether the pain woke him, or his waking kicked the pain into life, he couldn’t tell. All he did know was that every breath was sending fire around his ribs, across his shoulders and down his back. The fire paused in his chest to gather itself, psyching itself up to come out fighting with each new breath.

He rode out the waves of pain and discomfort, welcoming them simply as sensations. They hugged him like long-lost brothers whom he had not seen for a long time. He had forgotten what it felt like to expand his lungs with air and to feel muscles stretch and move.

He was vaguely aware of another man at his feet. That was appropriate. He wondered whether it was Zhao or Gao who was respecting him so. He tried to remember how to make the mouth form words, to speak to the man, but it had been so long that the knowledge escaped him.

The man with the eye patch shuffled backwards, and now Qin could see that his hands were solidly tied behind his back. He was something to do with the owner of this body, then; a prisoner of his.

The man with the eye patch ran, and Qin felt the urge to pursue him and cut him down. It would be a great pleasure to kill a criminal who had been so impudent as to enter his presence. The body still would not obey his commands, and the half-bound man was gone in a moment.

Every particle of his skin tingled, the robes he wore constraining his chest. The sound of running footsteps echoed in the dimness of the cave. The light from a few fallen torches made him wince, and he wished the tingle of air on his skin would stop. He stretched and took a step.

He almost fell, unfamiliar with this body’s balance. He didn’t remember noticing the need for balance before. Had he simply been gone so long, or was something wrong with this body?

Qin looked around, slowly and carefully, and saw two other men in the same kind of robes he was wearing. They staggered as if they were drunk, and he knew they were Zhao and Gao because only the two generals could possibly be experiencing the same sensations and unfamiliarity with their bodies that Qin was.

For a moment he was overwhelmed by the sense of being in three places at once: Qin, looking at Gao, looking at Zhao, looking at Qin. Somehow - perhaps because of the angles he was seeing them from - he knew that Zhao was the large man with muscles like an ox, and that Gao was now the other man.

There was a voice, too. No, not a voice... a thought, or maybe just a feeling, somewhere at the back of his mind.

Somewhere at the back of three of their minds. He didn’t quite catch it, and then it was gone, but he could feel the potential for it to come back.

It took a few minutes to become used to the legs and arms of this body, and learn to ignore the twinges in its back and the niggles posed by its teeth. By then, he was able to walk around almost normally and joined Zhao and Gao in the centre of the chamber. Above them, mercury flowed and glinted wetly.

Gao was looking at his hands, his expression still vacant.

Qin suspected his own was no better. ‘The wizard spoke truth,’ Gao whispered, stumbling over the words with his unfamiliar tongue. ‘I wonder how long -’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Qin said. ‘If this is the time, then this is the time.’

Then Qin heard the voice that was not a voice booming in his head. From Zhao’s and Gao’s expressions he could tell they heard it too.

‘This is not quite the time. This is the prelude.’

‘Then the Eight Thousand...?’ Zhao began.

‘The window is too short,’ Qin said. But we will need an elite. Perhaps a handful of captains. There is enough for that.’

‘Yes,’ Zhao replied, in the echoing voice Qin had just heard come from his own lips. ‘There is enough of a window for that.’

The two generals, as the abbot had called them, had removed Barbara and Vicki after their audience with the ‘emperor’ and locked them in what used to be some kind of storage cellar.

The walls were still lined with shelves, and the room smelt of vinegar and dark sauces.

‘The First Emperor?’ Vicki prompted. ‘That’s impossible, so who is he really?’

Barbara gave the girl a smile, but it faltered, empty of the reassurance it should have had. ‘The abbot Cheng spoke about, I assume. And he’s - I suppose “insane” is a cruel word - seriously mentally ill.’

‘You must not speak of my Lord this way,’ the thinner general snapped. He was standing on the other side of the door, sneering at the women through a small window. ‘He is the First Emperor, and my brother and I are his generals.’

‘The First Emperor? That’s impossible,’ Barbara insisted.

You know it is.’

Gao snorted. ‘I do not.’

‘And if I took you to an asylum in England I could introduce you to any number of people who think they’re Julius Caesar, or King Arthur, or Jesus.’ Barbara concentrated on what she was saying, to keep the panic out of her voice. ‘He needs help; you must see that.’

‘The only ones here who need help are yourselves, and there is none here.’ Gao turned on his heel and Barbara heard him march away.

‘I think they’re all crazy,’ Vicki said. ‘Shouldn’t we try to get them to a psychiatric hospital?’

‘I don’t know, Vicki. Asylums in even the most civilised European cities of this era were places of torture and terror.

I’m not sure what good one would do him.’

Ian had searched everywhere and found no sign of Barbara or Vicki. His stomach churned more and more with the increasing certainty that the attackers had taken them. He rejoined the others, who now included Cheng.

‘Doctor,’ he said, ‘Barbara’s gone. And Vicki. I’ve looked everywhere.’

‘I saw one of them carry off the young girl,’ Three-Legged Tham said.

‘And the one I fought was carrying Barbara,’ Fei-Hung added.

‘I knew it,’ Ian snarled, kicking over a wooden stool. ‘But who could have done it?’

‘Well, I still say Jiang,’ Tham said. ‘He’s petty enough.’

‘If it is, I’ll-’

‘No, Chesterton,’ the Doctor interrupted. ‘You know, that young man was most disagreeable, and I can certainly believe he would bear a childish grudge, but this raid that took the girls was too precise and too powerful for him.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I rather think Mr Jiang would have tried to waylay one of us in the street, or break in and cause trouble on his own. This was more a sort of a military operation.’

‘I see what you mean, Doctor,’ Ian agreed slowly. ‘It does look like some sort of commando raid.’

‘A commando raid, yes. That’s it exactly, Chesterton. This was a carefully planned raid to snatch the girls and take them away for some purpose.’

‘Not to kill them. They’d just have done that here.

Leverage?’

‘On us, you mean? Yes. I think we will hear from the kidnappers soon enough.’

‘Not soon enough for me.’

‘We still don’t know who they are.’

‘I think I might,’ Cheng said.

Ian and the Doctor both looked at him.

‘The abbot who’s split the Black Flag. Jiang was practically worshipping him, and if he’s the one who’s been razing villages he certainly has the experience of warfare.’

‘Now, you’ve mentioned this abbot before,’ the Doctor said.

‘Tell me some more about him, if you please.’

‘If your women are in his hands... It might have been better for them and for you if they had just died here.’

‘And why is that?’

‘Because the abbot’s insane. I don’t mean eccentric or silly.

He cut out the eyes and tongue of a friend of mine because he wouldn’t say that the unskinned deer in front of him was a roasted pig. Then he carved out the deer’s still-warm heart and ate it.’ The memory put a cold sweat on Cheng’s brow and between his shoulder blades. ‘He just isn’t human.’

The Doctor looked sharply at Cheng. ‘Is that so? We’ll see.’

He turned to Tham. ‘Sir, when Master Wong wrote to you he will have asked if you have heard of other attacks.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard of other attacks.’ Tham unrolled a map.

‘The first was here, near Shaoshan. Then further south, east of Guilin. They seem to be concentrating on older towns, monasteries, temples... It makes no sense to me.’

‘Tell me,’ the Doctor said. ‘It is
yuelaan jit
, is it not?’ Tham nodded. ‘Have there been reports of, shall we say, strange occurrences in the vicinity of these places?’