Master Li had stepped up beside me, and now he whirled back toward the center of the room just as the stone chimes stopped playing and the dancing corpse collapsed limply to the floor, as though someone had cut the strings operating a puppet. The one-legged hooded figure stood motionless.
“Careful, Ox.”
As if I needed the warning. I moved forward cautiously, scooping up a heavy bronze figurine as a weapon, and Master Li made a flanking movement with his knife cocked beside his right ear. The chimes player still made no motion. I was at an angle where I could look straight him—or it—and in the dark shadows behind the opening of the hood I thought I saw the gleam of a single eye in the center of a forehead.
Suddenly there was a bright flash that blinded me. I gasped and stepped back, covering my eyes, and gradually the orange haze and black spots cleared, and I stared at the room. So did Master Li, blinking and rubbing his eyes, and there wasn’t any one-legged chimes player. He wasn’t in the room, and he wasn’t in the hall outside, and the wind whipped the curtains away from the window and we gazed out and up at the night sky, where a great white crane was slowly flying away across the face of the moon.
4
“Well, Kao, have you found anything interesting?” the Celestial Master asked.
“Mildly so,” Master Li replied. “To begin with, another mandarin—I assume you know, or knew, Mao Ou-Hsi?”
“Revolting fellow. Third-greediest man in the empire, the Celestial Master said disgustedly.
“The fourth-greediest will be interested, because he’s just been promoted,” Master Li said. “Mao bade farewell to the red dust of earth last night in a rather spectacular manner. Ox and I happened to be there at the moment, and the creature who killed Mao then disappeared in a bright blinding flash, and the next thing we saw was a white crane flying away across the moon.”
The Celestial Master paused with a teacup halfway to his lips. Briefly, in an instant in which his eyes sharpened and hardened, I glimpsed the brilliance and sureness of long ago, when he had been considered to be the finest mind in the empire.
“How convenient,” he said dryly. “Did it carry a sign in its beak saying ‘Save the Celestial Master from Mother Meng’s Madhouse?’ “
Master Li tossed his head back and laughed. “Believe it or not, this actually happened,” he said. “As soon as we’d looked around and found nothing we summoned the magistrate to take over, and at the moment the gates opened at dawn we entered the Forbidden City and chased the honor guard away from the remains of the late Ma Tuan Lin, and I had Ox open the coffin. You tell it, Ox.”
I gulped nervously as the bright eyes of the saint flicked toward me.
“Most Reverend Sir, the corpse was lying on its back, of course, but I managed to lift it upright—”
“That must have been a hell of a job,” the Celestial Master said, with real concern in his voice.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “The body was covered with Dragon’s Brains (Borneo camphor), which made me choke, and after I scooped it away I started to choke from the smell of the corpse, and there wasn’t any head and it looked horrible.” I started choking again, just at the memory. ‘The body was stiff as a tree trunk and I almost got a hernia trying to lift it.”
“Ghastly tub of lard, wasn’t he?” the Celestial Master said sympathetically.
“He hadn’t missed much rice,” I said diplomatically. “Master Li had me prop him up so we could examine the back.”
“And?”
“Reverend Sir, it was just as you told us!” I said excitedly. “The entrance mark of the fireball was very small and the folds of robes covered it up, but Master Li cut through the clothes and skin, and just beneath the outer flesh there was a great big hole! Everything inside had been burned to a crisp.”
The saint sipped his tea and put the cup down, and then he leaned back and rubbed his eyes.
“How odd,” he said. “Kao, I’d just discovered what caused me to hallucinate about that old man and his ball of fire, and now you tell me I wasn’t hallucinating.”
He leaned forward, and his eyes were clear and keen. “I’m going to show you what might have stimulated a senile imagination, but first I’m interested in a matter of symmetry. You say Mao Ou-Hsi died spectacularly. Was a monster involved?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about it.”
Master Li told what we had seen, simply and clearly, and as he talked I saw wonder and speculation form in the saint’s eyes.
“Well, Kao, I said at the beginning this was your sort of case, but I didn’t know how right I was,” the Celestial Master said. “Before I tell what I know, is there anything else you want to add?”
“Indeed yes. Beginning with this,” said Master Li, and he pulled the cage we’d found from beneath his robes and placed it on the table.
“Pretty, and it looks like the thing Ma was carrying, but what is it?” the Celestial Master asked.
“Damn. I was hoping you could tell me once you got a close look at it,” Master Li said. “It is indeed the cage you saw and we found it where you said it was. The interesting thing is that Ma Tuan Lin had made a rubbing of an old stone carving depicting a cage like this. On the back he indicated he might have found as many as eight of them. A plausible inference is that he gave cages to partners in some sort of enterprise, and I had traced one to Mao Ou-Hsi, which is why we were there. Simultaneous with the murder the cage was being stolen, and the burglar was another monster. It was a man resembling an ape like the one the emperor takes such pride in at the imperial bestiary: silver-gray fur or skin on the forehead, bright blue cheeks, a crimson nose, and a yellow chin. The eyes are deep and shadowed, and the gaze is highly intelligent.”
The Celestial Master nodded. “A mandrill, if one excepts the intelligence. Why do you say ‘man-ape’?”
Master Li shrugged. “So far as I could tell, the body was that of a medium-size but very powerful and acrobatic man, and both the body motion and eye contact were human.”
The saint nodded and said, “The creature means nothing to me. He got away with Mao’s cage, you say? Another crane?”
“No, he simply leaped out the window to the garden before either of us could move. Speaking of monsters, the vampire ghoul who decapitated Ma Tuan Lin is dead, in case you haven’t heard, and I haven’t the slightest idea what its connection to the rest of it is. I’m trying to track down the owners of the other cages, and until I can find out why monsters would want them I’m at the end of a blank alley.”
Master Li leaned back and the Celestial Master leaned forward, taking a sheaf of papers from a lacquered box lying on the table.
“I can’t tell you why the cages are valuable, but I can give you something to think about concerning monsters,” he said. “When I was a young student—long before you were born, believe it or not—I went through the normal period of fascination with ancient shamanism. That means shamanism of the aborigines who originally inhabited China, of course, practiced by priests of beliefs and rites that to some extent evolved into our own, and I found repeated but maddeningly unspecific references to a small group of shamans who seem to have been greatest of alclass="underline" Super Shamans, if you will, aloof and mysterious, to be appealed to only as a last resort. I was never able to prove this, Kao, but I became convinced that they’re the mysterious hooded figures depicted on the walls of the Yu.”
“Really?” Master Li appeared to be very interested. “Any specific reason?”
“One specific, one not. The nonspecific is simply the fact that they were spoken of with awe as always being silent, always performing mysterious rituals with mysterious objects beyond the grasp of man—the general atmosphere of the Yu, if you will, and the Yu and the shamans would seem to date from the same period. The specific is that there were eight of them, like the eight Yu figures, and indeed they were known as Pa Neng Chih Shih.”