The Geomancer's Compass (23 page)

“What the …?”

But it wasn't just the tank's foul contents oozing out of
the toilet. There was something else as well. Something beginning to thicken and congeal, beginning to take shape.

Suddenly the toilet lid began to chatter maniacally. It reminded me of this stupid joke toy my dad used to bring out at parties, a set of teeth that you wound up and they would chatter and lurch drunkenly around a tabletop. Only that was kind of funny, and this really wasn't.

And then it got worse.

Poisonous green smoke started steaming from the hole.

“I'd say we found our man,” Brian said quietly. “Just like the Mounties.”

“No shit, Sherlock!” I managed to croak.

“It's time,” the avatar said quietly. “Brian, Miranda, it's time.” But we just stood there, dumbfounded and staring. All the smoke and ooze were melding together into something that was becoming three-dimensional … I don't know how to describe it. It was compelling. It was hypnotic. “Don't look at him,” the avatar warned us. “He'll gain power over you if you look at him.” But it was as if its voice came from far away.

“Him?” I repeated dreamily. “Who's ‘him'?”

“Qianfu! Miranda, Brian! Look away, I tell you!”

Then the shape did something that got our attention – a real showstopper. It exploded, and green globs flew everywhere. Instantly, the spell was broken.

I wheeled to face Brian. “What …? Where'd it go?”

“I don't know!”

Then the avatar's disembodied voice: “Give me the
lo p'an
, Miranda.
Now
.”

I looked this way and that. “What? How? Where are you?”

The myriad of green globs began to act like one of those schools of fish that elude predators by dazzling them. You know what I mean – the fish go this way, then that, moving as a unit, compressing and expanding and making all kinds of crazy shapes, and it all seems to be choreographed, only how could that be? They're
fish
. And then, bam, a flash expansion and suddenly gone, and in its place the avatar, only much bigger than before – seven, maybe even nine feet tall.

“That's a neat trick,” said Brian.

“I'll teach you how to do it one day,” the avatar replied. “If you survive this. The
lo p'an
, Miranda!
Miranda
!”

“Just a sec. I know it was here somewhere …” I rooted in my knapsack.

“Give it here!” Snatching the knapsack from me, Brian retrieved the cherrywood box from its side pocket, opened it, removed the
lo p'an
, and lobbed it to the avatar. The compass tumbled end over end through the air as it described the now familiar arc that began in our world and ended in the avatar's. It paused at the arc's midpoint for a mere second, suspended, before executing a spin so fast that all we saw was a blur. Then, with a wet-sounding
pop
, it penetrated the membrane that stretched between our two realities, actual and
virtual. The avatar caught it with both hands and turned to face the downed porta-potty.

“Get out of here,” it ordered. “Both of you. Dig him up. Do it as quickly as you can.”

Something turned over in my brain, clicking into place like a gear shifting, then locking. I grabbed the suit bag. “Someone's bound to have heard that alarm,” I told Brian. “We've got to hurry.”

“Right!” He turned abruptly and started across the tee, with me on his heels. As we crouched to step through the ragged opening he had cut in the wall of the berry bush, I had to suppress an urge to look back over my shoulder. Don't, I told myself grimly. That way madness lies. There's only one way now, and that's forward.

The instant I stepped through the breach in the bushes and into the clearing, my Zypad went off with a shriek.

“What's the matter?” Brian hissed. “Why's it doing that?”

“It's detecting that bloody laser beam you broke,” I snapped. That kind of frantic
beep-beep-beep
is annoying when you're chill; when you're not chill, it's enough to send you through the roof. “It picks up invisible info: sensor data, radiation levels, lines of force …”

“Never mind that! Can't you disarm it?”

“I'm doing that, Brian! Just give me a sec. We don't want to trip that laser beam again.” I consulted the Zypad, made some adjustments, and zoomed in. “OK,” I said, “according to
this, the beam is about two feet into the enclosure and around three feet high. I see just the one beam and it looks to be static, not oscillating, so we should be OK to crawl under it.” Crushing the suit bag to my chest, I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled under the beam. Brian followed suit. Three feet inside the perimeter I consulted the Zypad again. “All clear.”

I stood and glanced around. The space within the bushes was larger than it had looked from outside, certainly larger than I had expected, maybe fifteen feet by fifteen. Its center was marked by a slab of granite, rough on one side, polished on the other, to which a bronze plaque had been affixed. I crossed over to it and crouched down. “ ‘Here lie the remains of an unknown First Nations man believed to have been an ancestor of the Stoney Sioux of this region,' ” I read. I stood and glanced around me. “But where is ‘here'? We don't have time to dig up this entire space. This is a job for IAF.”

“IAF?”

“Infrastructural anatomy function – a walk-on-map function. It lets me see underground. I'm going down.” I switched on the function and gazed down at the ground through the quivering yellow grid that the application had superimposed over my field of vision. “Elijah said it was a shallow grave, didn't he?”

“Two feet.”

“I'm going to set the maximum at three feet, then. We
can go deeper if we need to.” I adjusted the controls and began to slowly walk the grid, keeping my eyes fixed on the ground as the function drilled down one foot, then two, until suddenly a glowing lime-green 3-D shape reminiscent of a mummy appeared on the screen.

It was the symbol used by WorldBoard to designate a burial.

I
stopped in my tracks and pointed wordlessly at the ground.

There it was. There
he
was, what was left of him. Qianfu, The Grandfather's twin brother. What we had come here for, what had eluded us all this time. And by “us” I meant not just Brian and me, but all of those who had borne the name Liu over many years. Qianfu was unlucky in life, unlucky in love, and the hapless victim of a hate crime whose repercussions had extended far beyond his murder and down through the generations until finally,
finally
, what had been for so long lost was found. I turned to look at Brian, my eyes wide, and held out my arm so that he could see the Zypad's screen.

“Wow,” he said, and we both stared at the ground, speechless, for the moment at least.

I roused myself to action. After all, how much time did we have before somebody responded to that alarm? It couldn't be long now. “Follow this line,” I told Brian. Using the toe of my Keds, I traced the outline of the grave as it appeared on my grid. Brian followed close behind me, deepening the outline with the shovel's blade. The surface area of the grave was quite small, maybe three feet by three feet – smaller than a typical grave, presumably because it contained loose bones rather than a complete skeleton. Government policy dictated that First Nations burial sites be left undisturbed; that had worked to our advantage. Had the bones been removed from the site, they would have probably been placed in some kind of ossuary and reburied in a standard seven-foot-deep grave, not Rawlins's shallow two-foot one. A deeper grave would have required a much greater effort, and far more time to dig up. We were lucky – if catching a break after generations of being cursed could be considered lucky.

While Brian cut the sod above the grave, I retrieved the suit bag, laid it on the ground, and unzipped it. Then I straightened up and, hugging myself tightly and chewing on my lower lip, looked on as Brian methodically sliced the sod into squares with the shovel's blade end. Too methodically, for my taste. Who cared how neat a job he did? “What are you doing?” I demanded. “Why aren't you digging?”

“I'm the landscape guy, remember? I know what I'm doing.
First
you lift the sod.
Then
you dig.”

“I don't like this,” I fretted. “I can't believe nobody's going to check out that alarm.” I glanced over my shoulder toward the opening in the bushes. “And it's way too quiet. What's going on out there, anyway? With The Grandfather and the ghost? Why don't we
hear
anything?”

“Do you want me to dig or listen?”

“Dig!”

And that was when we heard it – a distant combination of growl and bark, coming from the direction of the clubhouse. All the hairs on my neck stood on end, and my stomach lurched.

“Uh-oh,” said Brian.

“You told me that there wouldn't be any dogs!”

“I told you there
probably
wouldn't be any dogs.”

“You sounded awfully positive!”

“I'm a positive kind of guy!”

I wrung my hands. “That doesn't sound like a nice dog!”

“No, it really doesn't. On the bright side, it sounds like there's only one of them.”

“Great!”

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and gave myself a stern talking-to: OK, Miranda, if it's a choice between being mauled by a dog now or eaten by a shark later, then … then what? I snorted. Who was I kidding? The only
real
choice I had was how I was going to handle this challenge, whether I was going to be paralyzed with fear or go down fighting. And I
could
choose. I couldn't always choose what happened
to me – I often couldn't, and I certainly hadn't chosen this whole Qianfu thing – but I sure as heck could choose how I dealt with it. “Oh well, maybe he'll only maul us a little,” I said to Brian. “You keep digging. I'll suss the dog thing out.” Making my way to the edge of the clearing, I dropped to my hands and knees, crawled under the laser beam, and crouched in the opening.

What I saw took my breath away, as surely as though someone had punched me hard in the stomach. I sat back on my heels and stared, jaw slack with amazement.

The felled porta-potty lay in a pool of some dark, lustrous substance that gleamed like liquid mercury and seemed to have similar properties. The ancients called mercury “quicksilver,” meaning “living silver,” but the disgusting pool from the porta-potty, whatever it was, was not silver but poisonous green. A form rose from the pool like a stalagmite from the floor of a cave, glistening and slippery. At first I thought it was composed of the same matter as the pool, but then I realized that there was someone or, more likely, something encased within the green ooze, something that was trying to free itself.

Could that be Qianfu's hungry ghost? I could just make out a pitifully tiny mouth, wide open in a soundless scream, and two eyes like burning embers that radiated hatred and despair. Hatred and despair – a toxic combination, an altogether more potent concoction than hatred alone. After
all, despair fuels hatred, and despair has nothing more to lose. And what is a more terrifying enemy than one with nothing to lose? Oh, surely it was Qianfu! Who or what else could it be?

I leaned forward to try to get a better look. That was when I noticed the membrane – a thick, transparent membrane like that of a jellyfish, wrapped tight around the struggling form. It seemed to have a life of its own; it pulsated rhythmically, like a heart. It struck me that it was this and this alone that prevented Qianfu's ghost from breaking free. Where had it come from?

I glanced to my left and found my answer: the avatar. The membrane was like some kind of magical net that it had cast over the ghost, a force field of some sort, and now they were locked in this wicked cosmic standoff. The avatar stood facing the ghost, supersized. It loomed, arms outstretched, with the glowing green globe in one hand and the
lo p'an
in the other.

All of a sudden, I heard a man's voice and heavy canine panting and, I swear it, slavering. How could I have forgotten? The savage dog, the security guard … reality check! My heart skittered like a stone over water, slammed into something hard, and went into a death spiral. I dropped to my belly like a snake and wriggled backward, far enough into the bushes that I could see and not be seen – unless the security guard were to shine a flashlight in my direction, in which case it would be well and truly
game over
.