The house where the night soil collector lived with his wife was nowhere near as fine as the house where Li Lei had lived, of course. The small public room she entered was crowded and none too clean. But a fire burned cheerily in the hearth on the far wall. Its warmth was welcome.
“So the man was part of the tong, was he?” Chen Wu Yin’s wife demanded.
Li Lei hesitated, then shrugged, tapped her head, and nodded. I think so.
“What, are you mute?”
Li Lei opened her mouth and showed the fat woman why she did not speak. She then dug out the soiled and much-folded piece of paper she’d prepared, which described her supposed antecedents. For who would hire a mute boy who had no people to speak for him?
A surreptitiously softhearted woman who lived off the collection of shit, it seemed. For the woman could not read, that was clear, yet she exclaimed at the sight of Li Lei’s mouth, then muttered about fools and folly—it was not her husband who required mute servants, no, and why were people such idiots? And while she muttered, she retrieved for Li Lei a small bowl of bean curd, then lectured her about where she would sleep and how hard she would work.
To her disgust, Li Lei felt her eyes fill. She ate the bean curd and bowed her thanks, and her silly eyes stayed moist. At that moment she knew what she would do with the coin sewed into a sash beneath her clothes. It could stay here, with this woman who’d helped a dirty, mute young boy when she did not have to. She wouldn’t be needing it herself, would she?
After that she did indeed work very hard, and when she curled up in the straw in the little shed where she’d been told to sleep, her muscles ached and she could hardly stand to smell herself. But she knew now that the first part of her plan would work.
The one flaw with Li Lei’s disguise had been her voice. Try as she might, she could not sound like anything other than a young woman. So it was necessary that she not speak—and there was a good way to explain that. The night soil collector did not require mute servants, but the sorcerer did. A few impoverished but enterprising families had, early on, tried to place their surplus sons or daughters in his service by rendering them unable to speak. Chen’s wife assumed Li Lei was one of them.
For now, Li Lei would collect night soil—which meant entering the grounds of the sorcerer’s compound. Once she understood something of the workings of the place, she could change her disguise slightly. She did not need to pass for a servant there for long, after all.
Li Lei lay awake in the darkness, curled in the smelly straw, for a long time. She pined for sleep like a lover, but it would not come.
Just as the ghosts had not come. Not last night, or the night before, or the night before that. Or else they had, but Li Lei had been unable to see or hear them.
Her silly, fecund stepmother was dead. Her aunts were dead—her mother’s younger sister, her father’s older sister, and their aunt. So were the servants, even harmless little Shosu who used to giggle with Li Lei when she was supposed to be working, and fussy old Zi Jeng, who had worked for her father’s father.
Her father was dead. The babies . . . and oh, would not Jing be incensed that she thought of him as one of the babies? But he would not know, for he and the little girls were dead. She would never see or speak to any of them again. She did not even know where their bodies lay, to take them offerings.
Sun Mzao claimed such offerings could not reach them in the land of the dead, but while he knew a great deal about death, he admitted he had no contact with the dead. Neither did Li Lei. Her knowledge of death lay entirely on this side of the curtain . . . but aside from that limitation, it was abundant.
The Chimei had killed her entire family, using one of her loved one’s hands to deal the deaths. The demon could not herself be killed, much as Li Lei longed to send her across that dark curtain . . . but she could be hurt, diminished, stopped.
And the sorcerer could be killed.
He would be. Li Lei had vowed that on her true name—just before she’d cut off her tongue.
TWENTY
RULE sat quietly through a second making and pouring of tea. Alarm still pinged through his system, scattered after-quakes set off by Sam’s revelations. His thoughts were jumbled; he made no attempt to gather them. Not yet. There was a time to bear down and think through a problem, and a time when thinking was mere froth on the surface of deeper processes moving forward, unseen, in their own way.
Mostly he watched Lily.
She was upset, and not just by the threat posed by the Chimei. Topsy-turvy, she’d said. He didn’t understand. He tried not to feel affronted. He knew she’d always understood herself to be fully human, and it was rough to be forced to change one’s view of self. But was her notion of humanity so rigid it couldn’t flex to include a whiff or two of dragon?
Once the tea was poured, he inhaled deeply, allowing the scent to fill him. A question floated up into the froth of his thoughts. How would he react if he were told he wasn’t purely lupus?
Badly, he decided, and sipped.
More questions, more insistent: What would they do about this Chimei? How would they stop her?
A year ago he would have pounced on those questions, wrestled with them, stuck doggedly to their trail. The balance between wolf and man had shifted since then . . . a forced shift, perhaps, and acceptance had not come easily. But the new balance worked. His wolf was more present these days. If that made some situations—like hospitals—harder to navigate, it steadied him in others.
Like now. His wolf understood waiting. They didn’t know enough. Some shapes were emerging, but the murk was too thick to guess what those shapes portended. It wasn’t yet time to act, or even to choose an action.
He glanced at Lily. There was a small crease between her brows, and though she seemed to look at the cup she held, he doubted she noticed it at all. He would leave the first action to her, he decided. Soon she would begin to ask questions. The shapes would grow clearer.
For now, Rule relaxed into the moment. The air was almost painfully dry, which muted the scents it carried, but those scents were delightful—creosote, cypress and sumac, wild mustard and cholla, all overlaid with the lush moistness of the reservoir. San Miguel Mountain smelled like home to him, only without much wolf-scent. And with a good deal of dragon.
Most wolves wouldn’t care for that, and not because the smell was unpleasant. Sam’s scent was as compelling as his sinewy form, but it bore the meaty whiff of predator among its notes of metal and spice and mystery. The smell awoke the crouched beast in the back-brain, stirring the hackles, making feet twitch with the need to escape something much larger and more dangerous than any wolf could be.
Rule’s beast was calm. He knew this scent, this dragon.
The air was growing warm, perhaps unpleasantly so for humans. Rule asked Li Qin if she were comfortable here, if she required anything. She assured him it was much cooler inside Sam’s lair. He’d dug her a small “room” inside and enchanted it to remain cool. Something to do with moving the heat elsewhere, she said, through the rocks.
Rule smiled. Even the black dragon was not immune to Li Qin.
Lily asked what she could bring Li Qin. Food? An air mattress? Books? Rule’s thoughts drifted back to wolves and dragons.
Wolves prefer to run away if faced with an impossible battle—a more helpful attitude than human machismo, in his view. But Rule’s wolf knew this particular dragon. Knowledge did not make him unwary, but it settled his hackles. They weren’t friends, he and Sam, but there was respect and honor between them. Sam was deeply honorable, by his lights.