The Hidden Blade (5 page)

It must be a criminal pursuit. A night thief, perhaps even a flying thief, one of those martial arts-trained criminals who could bound three men high and leap across rooftops.

Her pulse accelerated as she realized the sounds were moving closer to her. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad to be awake in the small hours after all. If she could catch a glimpse of the thief, it would mark the most exciting event in her nine years of life.

A door in the row opposite hers opened. Out stepped Da-ren’s servant Bao-shun, a curved broadsword by his side. He cocked his head and listened carefully. Then he saw her and blinked in surprise.

He marched across the courtyard. “Bai Gu-niang, it’s chilly at this hour. You should be abed.”

“I can’t sleep,” she replied. “Can you tell me what is that sound? It’s coming this way.”

Bao-shun was taken aback. “You can already hear it? Bai Gu-niang has sharp ears. It’s probably nothing. The law chasing night robbers.”

“Can we go out to the alley and look?” she asked hopefully.

He immediately shook his head. “No, no, no. Fu-ren would have my head if she knew I let you out in the middle of the night with a criminal on the loose.”

There were times when she hated being a girl. She pushed her lips out into a prominent pout, the kind on which one could hang a bottle of oil, as Amah would say.

“Bai Gu-niang must not become cross with me—Da-ren would punish me if I upset you.” But for all his kind cajoling, Bao-shun did not back down. “Now please go back to your room. I’ll go have a look to make sure nothing’s wrong.”

The banging sounds rose appreciably. Between the beats, men shouted. Ying-ying pretended to acquiesce, retreating into her room. But as soon as Bao-shun entered the next courtyard, she came out and silently followed him.

Bao-shun walked about the middle courtyard, looking all around. Satisfied, he went into the front courtyard. She tiptoed into the middle courtyard, staying close to the wall-hugging rooms, on the walkways in the shadow of the extended eaves.

In the front courtyard, Bao-shun must have finished his inspection, for she heard him lift the bar on the front gate. She inched closer to the moon gate, a round opening in the wall between the middle and front courtyards, and was about to slip through when a movement at the periphery of her vision made her look back.

A black-clad figure was crouched on the roof, barely a stone’s throw from where she stood. She froze. For all her eagerness to witness a real, live outlaw on the run, she hadn’t imagined that he’d come this close to her. To her horror, he took a great, lithe bound, an abrupt yet graceful motion like that of a lizard, and landed
in
the middle courtyard, his feet silent as a cat’s.

He was on her side of the courtyard now, little more than the length of a
kang
away. She heard a whimper. It came from her own throat. The outlaw’s head turned. He was masked, but his eyes burned directly into hers.

All the stories she had ever heard about bandits and robbers scuttled amok in her head. He’d capture her and sell her into slavery somewhere so far away that nobody would ever find her again. Worse, he’d sell her to mountain bandits who loved the taste of children, especially a pampered child like her, with extra-tender flesh from having never done a day of work in her life.

Bao-shun was her only hope. She must alert him. He’d come and rescue her.

She opened her mouth to scream. But the only sound she made was a muffled “Hmmm” against a hand that was suddenly clamped over her face.

“Be quiet!” the outlaw whispered.

Her eyes bulged. The outlaw spoke with the voice of
Amah
.

She had no time to react. Amah pulled her forcefully along the fifteen paces or so to the storeroom. The next thing Ying-ying knew, they were inside the storeroom and Amah had collapsed.

The aura of power and danger that radiated from her was gone. She lay in a heap, her breaths alternating between quick gasps and gurgling, painful-sounding wheezes. Ying-ying stood petrified, her mind empty except for an ever-expanding shock.

“Shut the door, you stupid girl.”

Her feet felt like two clumps of mud, but Ying-ying made herself move. Outlaw or not, the woman was still her amah, the person who had brushed her hair and laid out her clothes every day of her life.

She had enough wits to close the door as quietly as she could, peeking into the courtyard as she did so. Bao-shun had not yet returned from the alley, and no one else was astir.

“Get me on the
kang
,” Amah ordered.

Ying-ying would never have believed Amah, who wasn’t much taller than her, could be this heavy. She thought her back would break. Amah’s teeth ground with pain as Ying-ying, unable to lift her fully, half dragged her along the floor. At the edge of the
kang
, Amah grasped onto its side, and Ying-ying used her shoulders and back to push the older woman up. At last they had half of Amah’s body on the
kang
; Ying-ying strained and flopped her over.

Amah sucked in a breath. Ying-ying tried to put a pillow under her head.

“Don’t waste time,” Amah panted harshly. “Make a fire in the stove.”

Then she vomited a stream of blood onto her own chest.

That set Ying-ying running. Despite the darkness inside the room, she was able to find the basket of scrap paper and wood chips without any difficulty. Making a fire with shaking hands, however, was much harder: It took her five tries to get one going.

“Boil water.”

Amah kept a wide-mouthed, knee-high crock of water near the door. Ying-ying lifted the woven reed lid and filled an empty clay pot. She fed a few bigger pieces of wood to the fire.

While the water heated, Amah rasped more instructions. Ying-ying located some dried flower buds on the bottom shelf. Tossed into the water, the buds gave out a clean, fresh scent, almost enough to mask the smell of regurgitated blood.

She was then directed to climb onto a chair and bring down a cloth bundle that had been concealed above the lintel. Inside were round balls the size of quail’s eggs wrapped individually in squares of silk, and a small porcelain jar. She unwrapped two balls, plopped them into the clay pot, and took the jar to Amah.

Amah struggled to pull her shirt up. A small package fell onto the
kang
. She ignored it and snatched Ying-ying’s palm to rest against her rib cage, below her left breast. “This is where you apply the salve.”

Ying-ying gasped—what she touched was cold as ice. She yanked back her hand, opened the jar of salve, and dug out a dollop.

“Warm it first,” Amah warned hoarsely.

Ying-ying kept the salve between her palms until it smelled faintly of leaves and bark. It began to sting her hands, making her palms prickle hotly. She smeared salve where Amah’s skin was unnaturally cold and kept her palm over Amah’s strange injury until Amah called for the brew.

When Ying-ying brought the bubbling potion, Amah drank it directly from the clay pot, stopping only to cool her tongue and gasp for air. When she had finished with the potion, she told Ying-ying to pull her shirt down and place the still-hot clay pot over where she had applied the salve.

“And put another pot on the stove. I must keep continuous heat over this.”

Ying-ying scampered around the tiny room, heating pots, ladling water to keep them from cracking, pouring water from one pot to the next, holding the hot pot on the right spot on Amah. She did this for what seemed like hours while Amah lay in a half faint, saying only, “Again,” and, “More.”

At last she said, “That’s enough. I’ll live.”

Ying-ying shuddered. She had been blindly, unthinkingly following directions, too busy and confused to consider that Amah might have been in mortal peril. She set aside the clay pot she had been holding, stretched her cramping arm, and let herself pant for a while.

The night outside was peacefully silent. The pursuit must have been called off—or taken to a different quarter of the city. Bao-shun was returning to his room, the bells on his sword tassel jingling faintly as he crossed the middle courtyard.

Amah snored lightly. Ying-ying stared at her curled-up form on the
kang
. How had Amah become injured? Where had she learned to leap off rooftops without breaking her ankles? And why was she the one being chased by the law, as if she were a dangerous criminal who needed to be apprehended?

Ying-ying pulled a bedspread over Amah. As she tucked in it around Amah’s person, her fingers came into contact with the package that had fallen from Amah’s shirt.

She took it to the stove where the fire still burned and lifted the stove lid for a bit more light. Inside the cloth was a small, thin panel of white jade, decorated with the image of a dancing goddess, the ribbons on her flowing robe floating all about her as if lifted by a gentle breath.

To the goddess’s left, the words,
Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness.
And to her right,
Form is exactly emptiness; emptiness exactly form.
The famous Buddhist tenet, so well-known that even Ying-ying, who had never visited a monastery or studied a sutra, had heard of it.

A nice piece, the jade tablet, but to Ying-ying’s thinking not quite worth the trouble. It was too small and insubstantial, for one thing. And as pretty as white jade was, the material was not nearly as beautiful or valuable as kingfisher jade from Burma, which was as green as bamboo leaves in the shade.

“Give it back,” said Amah, startling her.

Ying-ying wrapped up the jade tablet again before placing it in Amah’s outstretched hand. “I thought you were asleep.”

“Maybe I was. But what do I keep telling you about digging into other people’s things?”

And the jade tablet, did
you
have to dig into other people’s things to get it?

But Ying-ying did not say it.

“Go back to bed,” Amah went on. “But before you leave, kneel and kowtow to me three times.”

“What?” Ying-ying couldn’t believe her ears. “Why?”

Amah’s demand was preposterous. Ying-ying liked Amah. She adored Amah. But Amah was a servant. One did not kowtow to servants. Three times? She kowtowed to Mother only three times a
year
, on New Year’s Day, Mother’s birthday, and her own birthday. Was Amah out of her mind? If anything, Ying-ying should be the one expecting a show of gratitude for all she had done to save Amah’s life. Why, her feet were completely chilled.

“To acknowledge me as your master.”

Ying-ying would have laughed out loud if she hadn’t been so stunned. “My master in what?”

“Your master in the Order of the Shadowless Goddesses.”

“What’s that?”

Amah sighed, a sound somewhere between bitterness and irony. “Three hundred years ago every child south of the Yangtze River knew of it. But now it will be just you and me.”

“I don’t want to join,” Ying-ying protested. “I don’t want a master to order me around.”

She was old enough to know that the word “master” was not bandied about lightly. She’d be bound to obey and serve Amah. The thought did not appeal to her at all. Their current arrangement, where she listened only when she wished, suited her much better.

Amah’s voice turned unforgiving. “You know my secret. Join or die.”

It was not a tone Ying-ying was used to from the woman who daily cajoled her to eat her vegetables and wash her face, who never had a harsher word for her than empty threats to inform her mother of some particular mischief.

“You can’t kill me!” she responded indignantly.

“No?” Amah chuckled softly.

Before Ying-ying knew what happened, she felt an icy stab in her chest. A rising scream never made it past her throat as Amah’s finger, like a snake rearing from the grass, jabbed her twice along her jawline.

Her mouth became soldered shut. She could not get her chin to drop nor her lips to part. Trembling, she looked down. A tiny, straight-bladed knife glinted dully in the nether light, its tip straining against her thin blouse.

She swallowed. There was no arguing with
that
.

Sensing her victory, Amah retracted her knife. It disappeared up her sleeve. She jabbed again at Ying-ying’s face and unlocked her jaw.

Unhappily, Ying-ying performed the three kowtows, but she did them most sloppily.

Amah only sighed. “Go now. I need to rest.”

Ying-ying got up without a word. As she stopped at the door to peer outside, Amah’s voice came again. “And if you must skulk about at night getting yourself into trouble, at least put on your slippers.”

Chapter 4

The Upending

Grouse season had begun, and every self-respecting gentleman must ready his firearms. Leighton sat before a large table, reassembling the components of his fowling piece that he had taken apart to clean and oil.

The house had actual antique guns: flintlock blunderbusses, Long Land Pattern muskets, carbines that had seen service during the French Revolutionary War. Compared to those, the fowling piece was quite new, commissioned for Father when he had been a boy.

Outside, leaves rustled and birds chirped. The breeze that came in from the window was warm—and sweet with the scent of grass and honeysuckle. The sky was a lovely blue, the color of Marland’s eyes.

Mother had taken Marland away again—Leighton missed him with a painful ferocity. Leighton’s tutor, Mr. Hamilton, was also away on holiday. The hours never passed. They were fat with heavy, immobile minutes, with seconds that emptied as slowly as an old lady’s glass of sherry.

He and Father took a turn on the downs every day, but without Herb’s easy camaraderie, those walks were largely silent, just a man with too much on his mind walking beside a boy he still considered too young for the truly troubling matters of life.

The shotgun reassembled, Leighton set its stock against the pocket of his shoulder and pointed the barrel out the open window. He hoped words would come more easily when they were shooting grouse—Father was an excellent shot and took pride in Leighton’s marksmanship.

He pointed the muzzle up, and then slowly swept his aim lower. A man stood on the gravel drive at almost point-blank range.