"What is this?" Li Shai Tung asked, looking to Wei Feng.
"Watch," Wei Feng answered. "All of you, watch."
As the camera backed away, a large "big-character" poster was revealed behind the kneeling man, its crude message painted in bright-red ink on white in Mandarin, an English translation underneath in black.
PING TIAO INNOCENT OF BREMEN TRAGEDY
WE OFFER OUR BODIES IN SYMPATHY WITH THOSE WHO DIED
The camera focused on the man once more. He was breathing slowly now, gathering himself about the point of his knife. Then, with a great contortion of his features, he cut deep into his belly, drawing the knife slowly, agonizingly across, disemboweling himself.
Li Shai Tung shuddered. Our bodies. . . did that mean? He turned to Wei Feng.
"How many of them were there?"
"Two, maybe three hundred, scattered throughout the City. But the poster was the same everywhere. It was all very tightly coordinated. Their deaths were all within a minute of each other, timed to coincide with the very hour of the original attack."
"And were they all Han?" Tsu Ma asked, his features registering the shock they all felt.
Wei Feng shook his head. "No. They were evenly distributed, Han and Hung Mao. Whoever arranged this knew what he was doing. It was quite masterful."
"And a lie," said Wu Shih, angrily.
"Of course. But the masses will see it otherwise. If I had known I would have stopped the pictures going out."
"And the rumors?" Tsu Ma shook his head. "No, you could not have hushed this up, Wei Feng. It would have spread like wildfire. But you are right. Whoever organized this understood the power of the gesture. It has changed things totally. Before, we had a mandate to act as we wished against them. But now . . ."
Li Shai Tung laughed bitterly. "It changes nothing, Cousin. I will crush them anyway."
"Is that wise?" Wei Feng asked, looking about him to gauge what the others felt.
"Wise or not, it is how I will act. Unless my cousins wish it otherwise?"
Li Shai Tung looked about him, challenging them, a strange defiance in his eyes;
then he turned and hurried from the room, his every movement expressive of a barely controlled anger.
"Follow him, Tsu Ma," Wei Feng said, reaching out to touch his arm. "Catch up with him and try to make him see sense. I understand his anger, but you are right— this changes things. You must make him see that."
Tsu Ma smiled, then looked away, as if following Li Shai Tung's progress through the walls. "I will try, Wei Feng. But I promise nothing. Bremen has woken something in our cousin. Something hard and fierce. I fear it will not sleep until he has assuaged it."
"Maybe so. But we must try. For all our sakes."
CHAPTER TWO
Gods of the Flesh
KUAN YIN, preserve us! What is that?"
DeVore turned, looking at his new lieutenant. "Haven't you ever seen one of these, Schwarz?" He stroked the blind snout of the nearest head, the primitive nervous system of the beast responding to the gentleness of his touch. "It's a jou tung wu, my friend, a meat-animal."
The jou tung wu filled the whole of the left-hand side of the factory floor, its vast pink bulk contained within a rectangular mesh of ice. It was a huge mountain of flesh, a hundred ch'i to a side and almost twenty ch'i in height. Along one side of it, like the teats of a giant pig, three dozen heads jutted from the flesh; long, eyeless snouts with shovel jaws that snuffled and gobbled in the conveyor-belt trough that moved constantly before them.
The stench of it was overpowering. It had been present even in the elevator coming up, permeating the whole of the stack, marking the men who tended it with its rich indelible scent.
The factory was dimly lit, the ceiling somewhere in the darkness high overhead. A group of technicians stood off to one side, talking softly, nervously, among themselves.
Schwarz shuddered. "Why does it have to be so dark in here?"
DeVore glanced at him. "It's light-sensitive, that's why," he said, as if that were all there was to it; but he didn't like it either. Why had Gesell wanted to meet them here? Was the lighting a factor? Was the bastard planning something?
DeVore looked past Schwarz at Lehmann. "Stefan. Here."
Lehmann came across and stood there silently, like a machine waiting to be instructed.
"I want no trouble here," DeVore said, his voice loud enough to carry to the technicians. "Even if Gesell threatens me, I want you to hold off. Understand me?
He'll be angry. Justifiably so. But I don't want to make things any more difficult than they are."
Lehmann nodded and moved back.
There was the sound of a door sliding back at the far end of the factory. A moment later five figures emerged from the shadows—Gesell; the woman, Ascher; and three others, big men they hadn't seen before. Looking at them, DeVore realized they were bodyguards and wondered why Gesell had suddenly found the need to have them.
The Ping Tiao leader wasted no time. He strode across and planted himself before DeVore, his legs set apart, his eyes blazing, the three men formed into a crescent at his back menacingly.
"You've got some talking to do this time, Shih Turner. And you'd better make it good!"
It was the second time Gesell had threatened DeVore. Schwarz started to take a step forward, but found Lehmann's hand on his arm, restraining him.
"You're upset," DeVore said calmly. "I understand that. It was a fuck-up and it cost us dearly. Both of us."
Gesell gave a small laugh of astonishment. "You7. What did it cost you? Nothing! You made sure you kept your hands clean, didn't you?"
"Are you suggesting that what happened was my fault? As I understand it, one of your squads moved into place too early. That tipped off a Security captain. He reported in to his senior commander. At that point the plug had to be pulled. The thing wouldn't have worked. If you calmed down a while and thought it through you'd see that. My man on staff had to do what he did. If he hadn't, they'd have been in place, waiting for your assault squads. They'd have taken some of them alive. And then where would you be? They may have been brave men, Shih Gesell, but the T'ang's servants have ways of getting information from even the stubbornest of men.
"As for what I lost. I lost a great deal. My fortunes are bound up with yours. Your failure hurt me badly. My backers are very angry."
DeVore fell silent, letting the truth of what he'd said sink in.
Gesell was very agitated, on the verge of striking DeVore, but he had been listening—thinking through what DeVore had been saying—and some part of him knew that it was true. Even so, his anger remained, unassuaged.
He drew his knife. "You unctuous bastard . . ."
DeVore pushed the blade aside. "That'll solve nothing."
Gesell turned away, leaning against the edge of the trough, the jou tung uiu in front of him. For a moment he stood there, his whole body tensed. Then, in a frenzy of rage, he stabbed at the nearest head, sticking it again and again with his knife, the blood spurting with each angry thrust, the eyeless face lifting in torment, the long mouth shrieking with pain, a shriek that was taken up all along the line of heads, a great ripple running through the vast slab of red-pink flesh.
Gesell shuddered and stepped back, looking about him, his eyes blinking, then threw the knife down. He looked at DeVore blankly, then turned away, while, behind him the blind snouts shrieked and shrieked, filling the fetid darkness with their distress.
The technicians had held back. Now one of them, appalled by what the Ping Tiao leader had done, hurried across, skirting Gesell. He jabbed a needle-gun against the wounded head, then began rubbing salve into the cuts, murmuring to the beast all the while as if it were a child. After a moment the head slumped. Slowly the noise subsided, the heads grew calm again, those nearest falling into a matching stupor.