Heart and Soul (23 page)

She had ignored all palaces and furniture and anything else that couldn’t be moved, but she saw no reason at all they shouldn’t ensure that they had some allies in the other world.

After the dolls were utterly consumed in the little cooking fire, she pulled out her roll of paper cash. It was, of course, not the real thing, but paper made to resemble copper coins printed with
100 cash value
each. They even had the hole through the middle, where Precious Lotus had threaded a string, with the help of a needle. As was done for traditional funerals, she’d gathered 999,999 strings of cash. It was the very minimum that deceased were ever sent with, and how could she and Wen expect to get through with less than that? She also burned the various pages of many-colored paper that she’d been assured would convert in the other world to bolts of nine-colored silk.

Last, she burned the contracts, or copies of the contracts, which she’d caused to be drawn so she could—she had told the record-keeper—have copies of certain important things. They included copies of the marriage certificates of Wen’s ancestors, whose sons had been the ancestors of both the Imperial line and Zhang’s line. Also there were copies of the document detailing the succession of Wen’s ancestors, and that Zhang’s ancestors had become Prince of the High Mountain—a domain in itself, but not the Imperial throne. Nor had the second son any right to the throne.

She burned these copies of the contracts and then, to establish her credibility and her right to intercede on her lord’s behalf, she burned a copy of her own marriage contract, and a copy of the canceled contract that Wen’s father had purchased from the singsong troupe. On top of this she burned a copy of something yet more personal—a poem that Wen had written for her shortly after their marriage.

And then, as her fingers trembled, she’d burned effigies of a dragon, a turtle, a bird and a tiger. They’d given her the decree of heaven, she told herself, and the least they could do now was help her fulfill it.

Then she went toward the bed and grasped the porcelain cup filled with now-cool liquid. Before she drank it, she walked around the bed and sat down by Wen’s side. Then she swallowed the contents of the cup, rendered repulsive by being cold.

A spasm shook her, before she’d quite finished swallowing. It was a horrible feeling, like being submerged all over in ice and made incapable of breathing. It was in this state, she thought, that Wen had tried to speak to her—and she hoped he’d not thought she was killing him. She hoped he was not angry at her.

She took that thought with her into an odd agony, in which her chest seemed to have turned to stone as unyielding as granite, and in which it seemed her lips were sealed with the kiss of death, her breath stolen, her body made cold.

With the last of her intent and will, she reached for Wen’s hand. And, finding it, cold, by her side, she clasped it convulsively.

There was a dark, cold space, as if she went through a narrow tunnel, like when she had led Wen through the stone tunnel in the dark. And then, as suddenly as waking, she was standing by the bed, looking down at herself and Wen, both of whom looked too white, and quite, quite dead.

“Are we dead?” Wen’s voice asked softly from the side.

She looked over at him, or at what she assumed was his spirit form. He looked transparent, and she could glimpse the stone behind him through his form. But when she looked down at her own spirit hands, she found them quite solid. She must assume, therefore, that it was the lack of Wen’s soul that made him seem less than completely here.

“No,” she said. “We are merely sleeping for a time, while we visit the underworld.”

He frowned at her. His spirit self looked older and less trusting than his physical self. As though his physical self had remained young—or at least unformed—through his addiction to opium, but his spirit self had aged at the normal rate. Even without the soul to make it more substantial, he seemed more in control than he was in human form.

He frowned while he looked at her up and down. “You lied to me,” he said.

She nodded. “I had to. It was the only way I could think of to get you to follow me to the underworld.”

“But what good does it do you?” he asked, sounding quite confused. “To take me to the underworld? And how are we to return? And what are we to do there?”

Precious Lotus judged that the time had come to show respect and be formal with her husband, even if they were both in their spirit form. Kneeling on a floor that didn’t quite feel as though it were there, she kowtowed to him. “My Lord Wen, True Dragon Emperor of All Under Heaven, your humble servant begs your forgiveness and permission to explain how she did all in your best interests.”

His laughter surprised her. She had seen Wen smile, but hadn’t heard him laugh in far too long. In fact, since shortly after they were first married. “Precious Lotus,” he said, his voice tinged with laughter, “please get up. There is something very strange about your kowtowing to me, and in spirit form yet. I am not angry with you, nor do I suspect you of treason.” He frowned a little and for a moment looked very troubled. “You’re the last person in my household whom I suspect of treason. If you thought you must take me to the underworld, then there must be a good reason. I’m willing to believe you couldn’t tell the truth to my opium-addled body. But I am out of my body now, and ready to listen. Only, please rise, or I’ll have to strain to hear you. Your spirit voice is as soft and sweet as your real voice.”

Shaken, Third Lady rose. How could she not love a man who would trust her when she had just played such a monumental deception on him?

As quickly as possible, and in spare words, she told him what she knew of his predicament and why he’d found himself in it. He frowned only at the part where Red Jade was supposed to awaken all the rivers of China while the two of them were meant to recover Wen’s soul. “Jade? With a foreign devil? How could you allow it?”

“It was the decree of heaven and the mandate of the Jade Emperor,” Precious Lotus said, while she wondered if her husband truly believed she could stop his sister from doing as she very well pleased when she very well pleased. Perhaps he had spent too much time in opium dreams, if he thought that the person had been born—male or female—who could keep Red Jade from doing what she thought was right.

Wen inclined his head. “But she’s not one of them,” he said.

Third Lady knew better than to say that Jade had quite a bit of the foreign devil in the makeup of her mind. No good would come of it, she thought. And it would only hurt Wen. So instead, she remained quiet and bowed slightly.

His lips tightened. “If that’s what she must do, that’s what she must do, but I hope the Jade Emperor doesn’t mean for her to go and live among her mother’s people, for that would never do. She is better than that. She is one of us.”

Again Third Lady inclined her head. Like her husband, she was likely to believe that the Chinese were, of course, the best and most advanced people on Earth. She was also likely to believe absolutely that her sister-in-law belonged to them and to the Dragon Boats. But she would never try to interfere with the decree of the oracles. Of course, the oracle had said nothing about where Red Jade would end, or with whom.

“Very well,” Wen said. “You brought me here for a reason, so I take it there is a passage to the underworld?”

“There is supposed to be,” Third Lady said. “That way.” She pointed to a passage that hadn’t been visible at all with their physical eyes, but which showed as a fissure in the rock to their spirit eyes.

Wen held out his hand, and she rested hers in it. Surprisingly, for all it looked almost transparent, it felt to her grasp like his physical hand did. He pulled her by it, toward the passage.

They walked together down a dark tunnel in the rock, a tunnel that was probably not physical, with darkness all around them. This time he led her.

At the end of it, they suddenly found themselves in a place filled with light and sound. She blinked her spirit eyes, confused at the scene before her, which seemed to encompass several creatures that were not exactly human, a very large cart pulled by something that was not a donkey—unless donkeys had suddenly become glowing green—and a whole lot of bright red light.

From somewhere near at hand, a voice shouted, “You are arrested, for trespassing in the realm of the dead.”

AN HONORABLE ATTEMPT

Adrian Corridon wouldn’t have admitted to deceiving
Hettie Perigord. If it came to that, he would probably have said he was the deceived one, or at least the one against whom the greatest attempt at deception had been made.

If he hadn’t known very well what family Hettie’s father came from, if the girl’s parentage wasn’t written all over her face, which echoed faces all over her father’s family’s portrait gallery in far-off England, he would never have tumbled that this miss, raised in Cape Town, was anything but what she appeared to be: the daughter of a lower-middle-class family who, for inexplicable reasons, had chosen to save all their money and apply it toward her education.

But he’d recognized Hettie at first sight, because she looked just like her great-aunt, who he’d seen weeks before in London. And while he was willing to believe that her father—who had all the look of the Gilberts, Earls of Marshlake—might be a by-blow, this would be much easier if he did not look exactly like the second son, Joseph, who had disappeared many years ago and who was now, in fact, the surviving heir to the estate.

Having grown up in the region, his own father’s estate being adjacent to the Marshlakes’, Captain Corridon couldn’t help but think of that vast, empty, closed estate, waiting for its heir. And he had to wonder why the heir hadn’t come back. If it were, as his own grandmother had assured him many years ago, only that he’d run away with a maid or some such nonsense, he would surely by now have come back to claim his birthright. After all, every expatriate Englishman read news from the home country. Why, there were several newspapers devoted to nothing else. And he would know that there was no one left at home to mind the estate or anyone to refuse him and his lady love, be she ever so humble. More, since the title could be transmitted on the female line, what father would deny that to his only daughter?

Unless he had a very strong reason. And since having his attention forcefully called to the family that went under the name Perigord a week ago, when the farseers within the Secret Service had informed him that the heroic carpetship magician had to be one Nigel Oldhall, one of their own number, disappeared in Africa almost a year ago, Captain Corridon had come to believe that Lord Marshlake, alias Mr. Perigord, must have the strongest of reasons.

He must be working with a secret organization that competed with the queen in her attempts to obtain the rubies that anchored all of the world’s magic. That explained, too, not only how someone with Nigel Oldhall’s profile—from an old family, bright without being brilliant, with not a bone in his body outfitted for adventure—could have been turned. And how he and Peter Farewell, whom rumor claimed was a dragon but who had just recently returned to his estates and polite society as Lord St. Maur, had managed to avoid Her Majesty’s Secret Service all this time.

Corridon was not stupid. He credited individual agency and individual action whenever it seemed possible. But in this case, it had gone well beyond the levels of the plausible. From the intelligence they’d been able to gather, not only had these men managed to lead the Secret Service a merry chase; not only had one of them been turned from being an—unexceptionable—Secret Service man, himself, but they’d had considerable native help so far.