Aromatic smoke swirled and danced. An unsourced sigh at once cosmetic and cosmic filled the bedchamber. Whisked away by a zephyr, the bedsheets were replaced by new and fresh ones that smelled of roses newly plucked. As she moved toward the bed, the walls rippled around Malone. Unbidden, he found himself starting to remove his own clothes. Given the number of layers and the quantity of grease and other dried fluids they had absorbed, this was a considerable process.
She did not so much lie down on the silk sheets as spread herself across them like honey on lavash. Utterly unabashed, she turned to face him. One hand gestured and he found himself drawn toward her. He did not remember walking, just floating an inch or so above the floor. Wisps of incense-laden smoke massaged his body as he traveled, cleansing him more thoroughly than any bath, perfuming him as the Aztecs would a particularly important sacrifice.
“You will sustain me far longer than that youngster John Barrel,” she murmured. “You will renew me for many months, perhaps even years, until all has been used up. And you will enjoy every moment of it.”
He felt himself rising up over the bed, over her. Then he was sinking, the great mass of him descending as gently as an autumn leaf, until he became one with her.
She howled.
Blocks away, the door of a stable stall shattered when its occupant burst through the barrier as if it were made of cardboard. The nightwatch stableboy barely managed to fling himself aside as Worthless turned the main doors to kindling. Pounding through the streets, the fiery-eyed runaway scattered late night drunks and sober pedestrians alike.
Very soon, the stallion found himself outside a singular stone structure from whose topmost floor lamplight danced and twitched as if imbued with a life of its own. Whinnying and rearing, sending ordinary horses stampeding in panic from where they had been tied, Worthless stomped back and forth in front of the building. When two men managed to get a lariat around him, one twitch of the muscular neck sent both of them flying into a nearby water trough. Raising a rifle, a third prepared to bring the maddened mount down. One look from his intended target caused the visiting rancher to drop his weapon and sprint for the nearest available doorway.
In front of the furiously pacing horse, men and women were spilling from the building’s main entrance. Though some wore few articles of clothing and others none at all, their nakedness was not of as much concern as escaping a heretofore solid structure that seemed on the verge of collapsing. Indeed, as they gathered themselves in the street, a few turned to marvel at the quivering multistory building. Given the range of motion in which the outer walls were presently engaged, it struck all as impossible that they were not crumbling before their stunned eyes. Yet though it shivered and shook like a gelatin mold placed atop a steam engine, the building did not collapse.
Despite the grinding and rumbling of shaken stone, another sound could be heard. It was a roaring, a shrieking, a howling scree as if a pack of demons was being tormented in ways unimaginable to mere human beings. It was the sound of an evil spirit being hoisted by its own petard.
Or in this case, that of Amos Malone.
The bed, with its luscious silks and enveloping pillows and hand-wrought steel springs, was slowly disintegrating beneath its present occupants. The room was, quite literally, heaving in time to their synchronized movements. Locked against each other, they were unaware of their physical surroundings. Engaged in oneness, they became the universe while the real one disappeared. It was the totality of tao.
Beneath the immensity of Malone, the courtesan’s eyes widened.
“Not possible! It is not possible! How can you…?”
He moved suddenly, a certain way, and her eyes closed. Her nails dug at his back, much as those of an animal might dig at the ground searching for prey. She whined, she whimpered, she threw back her head and bayed. As she did so, her mouth opened wide. Determined, resolute, Malone kept moving even as an ethereal redness began to emerge from between her lips.
“I know the way,” he muttered even as he strove to maintain the effort. “I know the places to touch, the moves to make. You are done in this time and place, vixen. Be off with you, says I! Take yourself elsewhere and find another to feed upon. I’m Amos Malone, and I’m afraid I got to hang onto all the life-force I’ve got. Might need it later.” With that he thrust his hips forward as hard as he could, in a most distinctive, ancient, and thrice-forgotten manner.
“Holy jingle,” Barrel had kept mumbling, over and over. Not being conversant with old Mandarin, the driver’s enunciation had been only an approximation. But from the man’s semi-coherent sputtering Malone had been able to divine the correct pronunciation—and its true meaning.
“Huli jing!” poor Barrel had been trying to say. It was not an exclamation, but a warning.
The courtesan’s mouth opened wider still. Wider than humanly possible. Around them, the overheated air shuddered as the Huli jing spirit was expelled from the human woman’s body. Hovering in the air by the head of the bed, the nine-tailed fox-shaped apparition spun and whirled helplessly, bereft now of its human host. It snapped at him once, barking half in anger, half in amusement, almost biting his nose. In the far corner of the room, atop his pile of discarded clothes, Malone’s wolf’s-head cap snarled, and its eyes glowed red with fury at the sight of its hereditary enemy.
The Huli jing growled a last time, whipped its nine tails once across Malone’s face, and was gone.
Malone collapsed.
The air in the room grew still. Walls ceased their shaking and behaved once more with the discipline of stone. Crystal ceased singing and the flames in the oil lamps calmed themselves. Outside on the street, a manic horse quieted, huffed, and ambled over to a recently vacated water trough to drink long, heavy, and noisily. Beneath an utterly exhausted Malone, black eyes flickered, focused, and gazed up at him in wonder.
“Who… who are you, sir? What has happened here?” Raising her head, the woman regarded her elegant if unsettled surroundings. “I remember last being sold and being put on a ship. I remember a place, a port….”
Worn as he was, Malone still managed to muster a thoughtful response. “That would not, by any chance, be San Francisco?”
“Yes!” A small trill of excitement underlined her words. “San Francisco, yes. I remember being delivered and then… nothing.” Her gaze returned to him, searching his features. “You have a dangerous face but kind eyes, sir. What will you do with me?”
Letting out a groan that shook the foundations of the building one final time, he rolled off her. There was silence in the room for a long minute. Her expression expectant, she eyed the mountain of man beside her but forbore from interrupting his recovery. Then he exhaled heavily, sat up, clasped hands around knees the size of small boulders, and looked down at her.
“If it’s all the same to you, ma’m, I’ll take you back to San Francisco. There are good folk there o’ your own kind, folks who will find a decent place fer someone like yourself. One where you won’t have to worry about bein’ possessed. Because that’s what you were, ma’m.” The great sweep of his beard framed a surprisingly reassuring smile.
She looked away, neither demure nor embarrassed by her nakedness. “You call me ‘ma’am.’ My name is Meifeng.”
Malone nodded approvingly. Outside the closed window, a horse could be heard whinnying insistently. He started to rise. A hand, strong but graceful, reached out to restrain him.
“Before you leave to prepare for our journey, sir, I would show you my thanks for saving me, though I have but small and inadequate means of doing so.”
“I really ought…,” he began. But she was insistent, and begged him, and her dark eyes were now filled with the kind of earnest soulfulness it had always been his misfortune to be unable to refuse. Besides, despite all he had endured, he was always a fool for knowledge.