The Eleventh Tiger (30 page)

Gao didn’t return to the attack. Instead a startling, almost blinding, light blazed from his eyes and he thrust out his left hand. Fei-Hung didn’t know what this meant, but he knew it was bad for him so he dived and rolled, just in time to avoid a bolt of lightning that shattered the air and ignited a small wooden stool against the wall.

Fei-Hung snatched the stool up by the end of one leg and threw it at Gao before he could do whatever it was again. Fei-Hung didn’t understand what had just happened, and knew this meant it was time to get out if he could. His father had taught him that there was no shame in knowing when to withdraw.

Zhao was blocking the door, the same light beaming out from his eyes and from his grin, his left hand rising. Fei-Hung turned, too terrified to think, and found Gao advancing on him. Gao held a sword in one hand and was using the other to pat out a flame on his shoulder.

The hairs on Fei-Hung’s arms and neck prickled and he dropped, sliding feet-first to kick out at Gao’s kneecaps. Gao fell forward and, in the instant that he was separated from Fei-Hung by only a few inches of air, took Zhao ‘s lightning bolt in the face.

Instead of landing atop Fei-Hung, Gao was blasted clear across the room, where he slammed into the wall with enough force to splinter the boards. Fei-Hung had never heard a scream like his in his life before, and fervently hoped he never would again. It was a sound he knew he would hear in his sleep every night for the rest of his life, if he had one.

Fei-Hung instinctively grabbed the sword Gao had dropped, but realised that the steel would only attract the lightning if there was another bolt. Zhao had moved out of position, so Fei-Hung made a dash for the door. He burst into the fresh air just as there was a snapping bang behind him.

Zhao followed him out and another lightning bolt hit the ground under Fei-Hung. The blast knocked the running youth off his feet. Fei-Hung wasn’t injured, and he rolled and even managed to keep hold of the sword. He got on to his knees as Zhao paused by a small tree.

Zhao stretched out his hand again and Fei-Hung hurled the sword with all his might. It took Zhao through the palm, pinning him to the tree at the instant the lightning snapped into being around his fingers. His fingers and thumb simply burst. Jagged light ripped out from his body, emerging like sweat from a condemned prisoner. His scream put Gao’s out of Fei-Hung’s mind for ever more.

Then the blinding serpents of light slithered away into the ground and under the rocks where such wriggling things belonged - and Zhao crumpled, leaving half his hand pinned to the tree.

Fei-Hung caught his breath and all his desire to keep standing fled from his body. He slumped to his knees, too exhausted to keep in the sobs that his pounding heart and head were letting out. He didn’t feel scared or sad, but he had to let his sobs out like steam from a train’s engine. If he didn’t, he thought he’d explode just like an overheated boiler.

Fei-Hung couldn’t believe his eyes. Through the still-open door, he saw Gao rising to his feet, quivering and shaking with either trauma or rage. Fei-Hung couldn’t tell which, and didn’t care because the mere fact of his being upright was horrible enough.

Gao’s hair was smouldering, his lips torn to bloody flaps by shards of exploded teeth and his nose was all but gone. All this was bad enough, but it was his eyes that struck Fei-Hung the most.

They were gone. They had burst and their contents had boiled away in a literal flash. Through the blasted sockets Fei Hung could see the incandescent sun that was contained by Gao’s skull.

Gao turned away and slashed his hand through the air. A rent opened up, edged in lightning. To Fei-Hung’s astonishment he could see another place through the tear. A hill with tents and buildings clustered around it. Then Gao stepped through the hole and it closed up with a bang.

The Doctor and his friends, and Kei-Ying, Three-Legged Tham, Beggar Soh and Iron Bridge Three arrived some hours later. The Tigers had brought men from the militia’s Fifth Regiment to restore order to the deserted town.

Fei-Hung had managed to drag Zhao into the monastery, and had laid him on the dais in the main hall.

The muscular man was pale and covered in a layer of damp sweat. He was shaking and the sounds that made a tortuous escape from his throat could have been either tears, laughter or some bizarre, bastard offspring of the two.

‘He’s gone into shock,’ Kei-Ying said, as the Doctor and Fei-Hung wrapped blankets around Zhao.

At the sound of his voice Zhao’s eyes opened wide. They darted around searching for something. ‘What happened?’ he asked in a quivering voice. ‘Did the bandits get away from the cave?’

The Doctor, Ian, Vicki, Kei-Ying and Fei-Hung exchanged glances.

‘Bandits?’ Fei-Hung echoed.

‘What cave?’ Vicki asked.

‘Now, now,’ the Doctor said thoughtfully, ‘this poor devil has been through rather a lot lately, and we shouldn’t rush him.’

‘Devil is right,’ Fei-Hung said. ‘He shot fire from his hand, and -’

‘Undoubtedly some kind of advanced weapon,’ the Doctor snapped. ‘Just because something relies on the projection of energy rather than pieces of metal -’

‘There was no weapon, Doctor,’ Fei-Hung insisted. ‘He held out his hand like this...,’ he mimed the action, ‘...and lightning struck from it.’

The Doctor’s expression darkened and his eyes narrowed, seeing explanations that no-one else in the room could see. ‘I see, yes.’ He turned back to the injured man. ‘And what do you have to say for yourself, young man?’ he demanded sharply.

‘I don’t understand,’ the defeated general answered through teeth that were gritted against obvious pain. ‘I was in a cave.

We had chased some bandits who robbed a caravan. They went into a cave, and we followed. We fought them, and then...’ His expression went blank. ‘Then I woke up here, and my hand is gone.’ He swallowed, looking at the bandaged stump of his arm as if he could will his hand back. ‘Did one of the bandits do this?’

‘No, they did not, General Zhao,’ Fei-Hung said. ‘I did that.’

‘General?’ the man said, wonderingly. ‘I am no general, I am a monk. My name is Yeung.’

Everyone in the room started to talk at once, but the Doctor raised a hand to quieten them. ‘Hush now! A monk, you say, hmm? Tell me,’ he continued slowly, ‘did anything strange happen in this cave? Anything unusual?’

‘There was a sort of light,’ Brother Yeung admitted. ‘Like the reflection of the sun on water if you throw a stone into a pool.’

‘And what happened then?’

‘I woke up here.’

‘Yes... I’m afraid I, eh, rather thought that might be the case.’ The Doctor stood up. ‘I wonder, would this monastery have an infirmary of some kind?’

‘They usually do,’ Kei-Ying said. He lifted a large bag, not unlike a carpetbag. ‘And I have some useful ingredients here.’

He started pulling out jars and bottles, arranging them on the dais.

Fei-Hung walked around the dais as if looking for a clue to the monk’s state of mind. ‘He can’t remember anything. I’m not really surprised - if he was possessed, the mind controlling his body would not be his own. Any memories would have been drained away with it.’

‘Not necessarily,’ the Doctor said. He steepled his fingers and regarded the wounded monk. ‘This unfortunate man might still have some secondary memories of who - or rather, I should say, what - his strange handler may have been. Or what its aims and objectives were. The trick, I think, will be to find a way to get at and access them.’

‘Secondary memories?’ Ian echoed.

‘Well, if you read a book you remember the story, even when the book is taken away from you.’

Ian nodded, understanding at once. ‘You mean he won’t remember being that person, but he might remember hearing it think or something.’

‘Yes, dear boy, I should think there’s a rather good chance of something like that.’

The Doctor stepped over to Kei-Ying’s vast array of herbs and ointments that nestled like pigeons in little square nests.

‘But if he doesn’t know himself, at least consciously -’

The Doctor silenced Ian with a hawkish gaze. ‘Then we shall just have to inquire of his subconscious, shan’t we?

Hmm?’

He started to lift jars and bottles from the dais, and examine their dusty labels. A couple he put down on a plinth and the rest he put back, his hands darting in and out of the growing field of vials like birds hunting for that early worm.

‘Yes,’ he chuckled to himself, ‘the subconscious indeed.’

Kei-Ying looked at the jars and bottles the Doctor was collecting. He frowned for an instant but the frown cleared -

Ian was impressed by how quickly - and he nodded with both understanding and approval. He didn’t say what it was he understood, so Ian was left none the wiser. Instead Kei-Ying simply began measuring out tiny amounts of the contents of the vials and mixing them.

Ian was fascinated by how carefully he did this; the slowness and care with which he worked seemed as ritualistic and reverent as it was methodical.

Kei-Ying looked at him and Ian got the uncomfortable feeling that the Chinese doctor knew exactly what he was thinking.

‘If a man paints a picture,’ Kei-Ying said conversationally,

‘the brush strokes are unique, for the precise moment of each one with exactly that amount of paint on exactly the fibres of that piece of silk will never come again. That picture is part of who he is - a frozen moment in a man’s life.’

‘I suppose,’ Ian admitted, though he had no idea where Kei-Ying was going with this.

‘A herbal mixture made by a healer is the same. This draught will be unique, because these exact seeds will never be in my hand at this exact date again. I must take great care over it because it is part of me, part of my work, and I am a careful man who gives thought to such things.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘Ah, that is the first step in understanding. Who and what we are,’ Kei-Ying said, ‘is not just this flesh that contains our thoughts or even those thoughts themselves. It is everything we do, everything that is perceptible to ourselves or others.’

‘You mean context is part of who we are?’

Kei-Ying smiled and set the draught down, completed.

‘Have you ever watched a child fly a kite with a ribbon trailing from it, looping and turning through the sky?’

‘Watched it?’ Ian chuckled. ‘I’ve flown many a kite in my youth.’

‘Then imagine that you could, at one moment, see that ribbon at every point in the flight simultaneously. A twisting, complex tube that takes up perhaps miles of sky You can also see the air that supports the kite, the wind’s currents that brush against it as it brushes against the wind... Now imagine all of that is you. Not just your lifetime, but the real, whole you, affected by everything you affect. But the body and mind that you live in, that stands there listening to me tell you this, is only the ribbon as you see it normally.’

The wording was strange, and not very scientific, but Ian thought he knew what Kei-Ying meant. It was a sort of holistic view, he felt. He looked for the Doctor’s reaction, and saw that the old man was wearing a secret smile and the expression of someone who has just found a momentary wonder while passing through a rainbow.

Kei-Ying indicated the finished draught. ‘This is one of those unnoticeable and innumerable breaths of wind that have touched the ribbon that is me. Knowing this, I must create and treat it as carefully as I would any other part of myself.’ He held the draught to the monk’s lips, letting him sip at it.

Once the monk had drunk the draught, the Doctor waved his hand in front of the man’s eyes. The old Roman ring on the Doctor’s finger caught the light strangely. ‘Now, I am going to count backwards from five. When I reach one you will be asleep, but you will hear my voice and be able to answer me. Now. Five... four...’

Brother Yeung’s features relaxed, his eyes glazing over.

‘Three,’ the Doctor continued, ‘two... one.’ He stopped moving his hand. ‘Someone or something was with you for the last two years. It was inside you, but you heard it speak and heard others speak to it. You saw what it did and you know what it wanted.’

‘Yes.’

‘Who was it?’

‘General Zhao.’

‘And who is this General Zhao?’

‘Loyal general to the emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi. He is in Abbot Wu.’

The Doctor frowned. ‘In?’

‘Zhao’s memory was preserved. It took me over, came into my head. He is immortal.’

‘Immortality,’ the Doctor said to himself, as if trying the concept on for size. ‘Tell me, Chesterton, if you were in charge of something - a country, or even a large organisation

- and wanted to be sure that your plans for it were carried out for ever more, even after your time, what would you do?’

‘Look, Doctor, I like a good mental challenge as much as the next man, but surely this isn’t the time to be -’

‘This is exactly the time! And I know it may not seem like it to you, but I am certain that this is a vital key to rescuing Barbara. To outfox our opponent we must understand him.’

‘Well... I suppose I’d leave instructions - notes and memoranda.’