Five Odd Honors (58 page)

Pearl searched. After what felt like an eternity, she found the alien trace snaking through the convolutions of her mind.

She colored it pale pink, the shade she associated with the tea rose. Without touching it, she looked to where it had made its entry. As she had expected, the rose rooted within the Tiger. What she had not expected was that the parasitic growth seemed unshaded by the Tiger’s deep green.

Tea Rose was riding the Tiger, but the Tiger was apparently unaware what clung to its shoulders.

Pearl felt a breath of relief. She had not realized before this how deep her sense of betrayal had been. For many years now, since Thundering Heaven’s death certainly, but even earlier, when she had been determined that she would become a fit heir to her peculiar inheritance, Pearl had identified with the Tiger. The thought that it had betrayed her had been a thorn in her paw.

Pearl claimed a courage she had not known she lacked, assured that she could challenge the invader without ripping into what had become the center of her own soul.

Or so, at least, she dared hope.

Moving with elaborate care, Pearl set one hand on the rose pink tendril. I twould have been easier if her goal had only been to destroy the invader, but since she wished to use Tea Rose, Pearl must instead control her.

And from that first touch, Pearl knew this was not going to be easy.

Despair. Choking. Thick as fog over San Francisco Bay. Deadening sound. Deadening. Merely, purely, deadening.

Staggering from a post office, a piece of paper in hand. Printed at the top in both English and Chinese is the name of a prestigious legal firm. The listing of names and titles is longer than the text of the letter. This states simply, without elaboration, that her divorce from Thundering Heaven Ming is final.

There is nothing further, nothing to evoke how she had wept and pleaded, wept that surely she was not barren, that someday they would have the children Thundering Heaven so desired. Nothing to show how she had pleaded for him to at least consider adoption. Nothing, even as she had become nothing in the eyes of the man she had elevated as her lord and god on this earth.

Staggering. Placing a phone call. Empty bells, empty. Realizing that pleas will do her no good. Nothing will do her any good. Fate leaves her two choices. Of them, death is preferable.

The river. The cold water. Feeling it in her lungs. Longing for dissolution. Two horrors, inextricably intertwined. She is dead. Her body is dead. So, within it, is the body of the child, a tiny thing, not even vaguely human in shape. The boy child. The son. Fruit of the humiliating encounter when she had all but raped the man who had already declared her no longer his wife, who had thrown her out the door in furious disgust, his semen still wet against her bare thighs.
. . .

If despair had been horrible, this is worse. Clinging to the cold, colder, coldest corpse and the dead thing within. Clinging, because if only she can crawl back inside, crawl back in and animate the lifeless flesh then she will be able to bear the child, carry it to her lord, her master, redeem herself. Win him back.

And he comes and stares, he, her lord and master, he the light who had kindled her in the last, only to throw her away, and she reaches up and grasps and holds. And holds. And holds . . .

From this day forth, as man and wife, never to be separated, she the whispering voice in his nightmares, the force that renders his eventual fatherhood sour, his many long decades of warmth and breath empty until death itself seems a welcome release.

But she will not release him, not even then. Not ever.

The force
of hatred and malice was so intense that Pearl gagged, retching, flung forward in her chair, hands balled in her stomach. She struggled until the force of her will was equal to Tea Rose’s bitter and malicious memories. Although her grasp slipped, Pearl did not let go.

Another might have answered hatred with love, rejection with compassion, malice with forgiveness.

Pearl was Pearl, and offered sorrow. Sorrow for the child who had never had a soul. Sorrow for the mother who had never been, for the wife who had been and could not be. Sorrow for herself, rejected at the moment of conception, sorrow for Edna Ming who had never known that she was wed to twinned misery, not to a man. Sorrow for the young sons, brothers to a rejected daughter, rejected because they would not be sororicides, even in their thoughts.

Sorrow was Pearl’s weapon as she pulled herself hand over hand along the pink trace of Tea Rose’s soul: a po soul given hun intellect by its insertion into the liver and mind of the man who had been called to identify the body of a suicide, and had permitted himself the luxury of regret.

And because Tea Rose had shaped herself of sorrow (as well as of anger and despair, of malice and bitterness), sorrow cloaked Pearl as she pulled herself along the trace anchored at one end within her own mind, at the other within the mind of the man who had been her father.

Pearl hauled herself along that trace, glimpsed how Twentyseven-Ten—almost a Tiger and as nearly filled with malice and a desire to blame as was Tea Rose herself—had been manipulated to set certain characters onto the engine block of Pearl’s car, how he had convinced Thorn to complete the spell using compulsion and a touch of agile rationalization.

These events were as a maze into which Pearl might have been lost, but she fought the desire to delve into that wrong. Past was passed. Her need was to affect the present.

Sorrow served Pearl as a cloak and a good one, too. Even so, Pearl wondered that Tea Rose did not sense her coming and react. Seeking to understand, to sense whether Tea Rose might be feigning indifference, lying in wait, Pearl became aware that events were working in her favor.

Thundering Heaven was deeply involved in some action, an action that had Tea Rose so distracted that she no more felt Pearl moving as a dream of sadness through her soul than Pearl had realized who manipulated her sleeping self.

A maelstrom of hatred, a riptide of anger, shook the strange firmament through which Pearl forced her way. Brilliant crimson slashes of wrath raked the skies. White explosions of fury shook the earth. They made Pearl’s bones shake, her internal organs vibrate within her body, but she did not release her grasp.

The rose pink trace on which Pearl was traveling was wider now, wide enough that Pearl swung herself aboard like an acrobat mounting a tightrope, no longer pulling herself hand over hand, but running, sensible shoes slapping down on the hard, rubbery surface.

Pearl ran hard, urgency penetrating her being as glimpses of what events so distracted Tea Rose. Anger’s crimson light illuminated the present in which Tea Rose and her host resided, where they were bent over the body of a young Tiger, a young man they wished to slash free of everything that made him worthy of being a Tiger. . . .

Pearl had run hard. Now she ran harder, ribs aching, lungs gasping, drawing her sword, praying to what ever gods might listen that she not arrive too late.

Initially, Brenda was acutely aware of Shen and Parnell standing a few paces in back of her, of them and of the not-quite-silent watchers who lurked just out of sight. Her hand shook a little as she drew the first of the sequence of characters. She felt her control of the ch’i shaking also.

Steadying the flow of energy, channeling it into the black lines upon the grey stone, drew Brenda into the spell. She breathed deeply, permitting herself access to the tingle of brilliant golden green that was the ch’i of the Land Under the Hills. It flowed at her command, passing through her, entering the ideographs sketched on the stone.

Awareness of those standing in back of her faded as the gate took on dimension, the surface of the stone shimmering like a heat mirage. Brenda found she didn’t need the crib sheet after all. The logic of the tiles she had selected guided her from one to the next.

She was halfway through the sequence of fourteen when a violent jolt of pain flung her back on her heels and nearly broke her hold on the spell. Only an equally violent determination not to waste what she had done thus far kept her concentration from failing—that and an awareness that beneath the pain there was something, someone, familiar.

She recognized Loyal Wind with the next burst of pain, and knew that on some level he had recognized her as well. Recognized both her and her intent, and found a new will to fight against the blackness that sought to claim him.

With a lavish hand, Brenda flooded ch’i into her spell, hoped that some of it would sustain Loyal Wind, for if he lost consciousness, she would lose her anchor. Her gate might still open in the Lands, but that opening could be far away from the beleaguered Horse. Brenda was determined that they weren’t going to give him hope only to abandon him.

Voices spoke, but she was not certain whether they were on Loyal Wind’s side or her own. She refused to let anything distract her. The echoes of Loyal Wind’s pain were almost too much for her, roaring along her nerves, firing her brain, threatening to burn out her eyes.

Ninth tile. Tenth. Eleventh. Twelfth.

The pain growing worse and worse; her hands began to shake and Brenda had to press hard against the stone to ensure that lines that should be straight were straight, those curved were curved.

Thirteen.

She nearly botched that one although the final nine of characters was an ideogram she had practiced hundreds of times.

Something was wrong with her wrists. They were throbbing, the amulet bracelets around them suddenly too constricting, too binding.

Brenda forced herself to ignore the ache in her wrists, carefully writing the fourteenth and final character, focusing on each stroke and line so that it would be perfect.

She lifted the pen from the stone.

The heat mirage wavering shone brilliantly, the light blending the green-gold of the sidhe with her own Rat’s black.

“It’s open!”

Shen’s voice, triumphant, but with an undertone of shrillness.

Parnell’s words next.

“Brenda, acushla. By our Lord and Lady and all the spirits of field and stream, are you all right?”

Rocking back on her heels, Brenda pushed herself up from her knees and nearly crumpled. Her back was alive with pain, her back and wrists both. Catching herself on the edge of the rock, she saw blood leaking out between the tiles of the amulet bracelets.

“I’m fine enough,” she said. “It’s Loyal Wind . . . Let’s go!”

Brenda did not wait to explain. This was not a time for waiting, nor a time for defense nor for anything but motion. She swung open the door and breathed a foul musk combining blood, urine, feces, sweat, and rank terror that made her gag.

Brenda didn’t let this slow her, but darted through the gate, moving to one side to clear the doorway even before her eyes had adjusted to the dim light from the guttering torches set high on the walls of the stone-walled room. Her foot slid on something noisome.

She caught her balance even as she fumbled for the lead bracelet on her “attack” wrist and slammed it to the ground.

Dragon’s Breath blossomed in her veins. Brenda held out her arm, palm extended, at one of the two hulking figures that only now was realizing that this closed and locked room had been invaded.

The force of the fire caught him squarely in the face. His eyebrows flared and flamed before the skin on his face caught and began to burn.

Brenda caught a smell not unlike burning pork chops and heard a choked scream that turned into coughing as fire coursed through the open mouth down the throat and into the lungs.

Nightmares later.

The thought was hardly formed, for in the flare of her spell, Brenda had seen Loyal Wind.

The Horse was naked except for a shredded bit of blood-soaked rag about his hips. At first glance, he seemed to be standing, but then Brenda realized he was hanging from his bound wrists. These were tied to a post high above his head.

She understood her own blood-soaked wrists now, and reached for a second Dragon’s Breath amulet without hesitation.

“No!” Shen’s voice. He didn’t wait for her to obey. Without needing to resort to the intermediary of an amulet, he sent ch’i rocketing forth from hands extended, linked by joined thumbs.

The second torturer—for he could be called nothing else—toppled forward like a felled tree, hitting the slimed stone floor with a satisfying thud and crack.