“Lotus Cloud, open the casket!” I yelled.
The Duke of Ch'in transformed himself into a giant ape. We went bounding around the room again while Lotus Cloud, her eyes glazed with shock, slowly reached down toward the casket at her feet. Then the duke transformed himself into a boulder. We crashed to the floor, and the huge heavy thing slowly rolled over on top of me. I gasped for breath while a pair of pink-rimmed Key Rabbit eyes appeared in the boulder. A pair of Key Rabbit lips opened, and a piece of the rock quivered like a long twitching nose.
“I can grow heavier,” the duke giggled. “Heavier and heavier and heavier.”
The breath was being squeezed out of me, and my ribs were cracking. I could see Li Kao wrestling with the heavy table, and Lotus Cloud dazedly trying to fit the key into the lock. The tip of her tongue protruded from between her lips, and she looked for all the world like a little girl who was trying to thread a needle for the first time. Above me the pink-rimmed eyes were glittering, and I realized that sheer terror was driving the Duke of Ch'in to the edge of insanity, as it had done so often in the past.
“I shall hang you and the old man in a cage beside my bed,” he whispered. “My dear friends shan hsiao shall rip your flesh with their claws and beaks, and your flesh will grow back, and the claws and beaks shall rip it again, and your screams will soothe me to sleep at night, and thus you will spend eternity.”
I had no breath left. The room was swimming before my eyes, and my ears were throbbing with hurtful heartbeat sounds. The boulder grew heavier and heavier, and I could stand it no more.
Lotus Cloud screamed. She screamed so piercingly that a thin porcelain bowl broke in half. The open casket fell to the floor, and a wet throbbing heart lay sickeningly at her feet.
In an instant the boulder had become the Key Rabbit, and he frantically tried to reach his heart. I clung to his ankles with the last bit of strength that I had, and he wailed in fear as he slowly dragged me across the floor. The Key Rabbit's hand reached out, and Lotus Cloud watched him with eyes that were wide with horror. Then that marvelous girl reached down and scooped up the slimy thing at her feet, and she wound up in the manner of a peasant girl who had been the terror of crows, and she hurled the heart on a dead line across the room and through the window to the garden. The hysterical guard dogs descended upon the heart of their master.
The Key Rabbit stood quite still. Then he slowly turned to his wife, and he reached out with a strangely tender gesture, and his lips parted. I will never know what he wanted to say. The flesh withered upon the face of the tyrant who had given his name to China, and I stared at the clean white bones of a skull, and then the bones themselves dissolved into the dust of centuries, and an empty robe slowly floated down and settled limply upon the floor.
I managed to crawl over and lift the table from Li Kao, and he staggered to his feet and dived for the wine jar.
“The Yama Kings have been waiting a long time, and I would imagine that the Duke of Ch'in is receiving a rather warm welcome in Hell,” he said when he came up for air.
Master Li handed me the wine jar. I drank deeply and passed it to Lotus Cloud, who swigged like a soldier. The wonder had overcome the horror, and her eyes were wide and bright and filled with marvels. Master Li walked over to the robe on the floor. He bent down and reached inside it, and his right hand lifted with a small golden crown.
“What better place to keep the greatest of all treasures than the hole where a heart had been?” he said.
His left hand lifted, and I cried out in joy as an unbelievably powerful aroma of ginseng reached my nostrils. It was so strong that it revived me in an instant.
“Master Li, has our quest come to an end?” I cried.
“Not quite yet,” he cautioned. “This is indeed the Heart of the Great Root of Power, but we must remember that it is also the Queen of Ginseng. Her Majesty must never be forced. If she is to help the children of Ku-fu, it must be of her own free will, and we must ask her goddaughter to transmit her wishes.”
Master Li clasped his hands together and bowed deeply to Lotus Cloud.
“Meaning your Highness, the Princess of Birds,” he said.
Lotus Cloud stared, but her eyes were not as wide as mine.
“Master Li, you can't be serious!” I gasped.
“I have never been so serious in my life,” he said calmly.
“Me? With my thick legs and flat face?” Lotus Cloud exclaimed. Her sense of the fitness of things was outraged, and she flushed with indignation. “The Star Shepherd fell in love with the most beautiful girl in the world!”
“Mere literary convention,” Li Kao said, with an airy wave of a hand. “Beauty is ridiculously overrated, and if that was all that the Star Shepherd wanted, he had the young goddesses of Heaven to choose from. The Star Shepherd had enough sense to want a peasant girl whose eyes held all the hope and joy and wonder in the world, and whose grin could fell an ox at fifty paces. Ask this ox here,” he said with a wink in my direction. “Ox, remind me to change my business sign so that the eye is nine tenths closed. I should have known that Lotus Cloud was immortal the moment that Miser Shen reacted to her exactly as you did.”
Lotus Cloud stamped her foot. “I refuse to believe one word of this nonsense,” she said angrily.
“Why should you? The Duke of Ch'in took you to the Old Man of the Mountain, who removed your memory,” Master Li said reasonably.
He strolled over to the table and sat down, and placed the little crown and the Great Root of Power beside the wine jar. Then he opened his smuggler's belt, and the three feathers of the Kings of Birds jumped eagerly into place when he touched them to the rim of the crown.
“It is truly said that men die like trees, from the top down.” Master Li sighed. “If my poor brains had not been riddled by wood rot and little green worms I might have considered the fact that Miser Shen was not jealous of Number Ten Ox, and Number Ten Ox was not jealous of Miser Shen. None of Lotus Cloud's lovers was ever jealous. Now that simply isn't human if we're talking about love, but it is very human indeed if we're talking about worship. One is not jealous of a fellow-worshipper, and the pure in heart will always recognize a goddess. I have had occasion to mention the purity of Ox's heart, and beneath his repulsive exterior Miser Shen was solid gold. I have no doubt that her other lovers were equally admirable, which is why I was unable to recognize the young lady myself.”
He stood up and bowed to Lotus Cloud again.
“There is,” said Master Li, “a slight flaw in my character.”
He sat down and filled two cups from the wine jar and slid them across the table toward Lotus Cloud and me. Then he picked up one of the jewels that he had shown to the Key Rabbit.
“My stupidity was such that I remained unaware of the obvious until I found this,” he said sadly. “It is a very rare pearl, jet-black, with one small white flaw in the shape of a star. Lotus Cloud, I once gave this pearl to Ox, who rolled it toward your feet. The next time I saw it was in a drowned city, where it was lying beside the casket that contained the duke's heart. Dear girl, I knew very well that you forgot about a gift of pearls and jade ten minutes after you received it, but it never occurred to me to wonder what happened to the stuff.”