Return of the Emerald Skull (7 page)

I jumped across the gap between the two buildings

Mei Ling reached towards me, her arms outstretched. I stepped forward somewhat awkwardly and was about to shake her hand when she giggled and slipped past me. With a touch lighter than a racecourse pickpocket, she plucked the laundry sack from my shoulders and my swordstick from my hand, spinning me round by the sleeve to face her once more.

‘This will be taken care of downstairs,’ she said, placing the sack to one side. ‘While this’ – Mei Ling held up my swordstick and flicked back the catch to reveal the blade – ‘this interests me.’

‘Careful, that blade's sharp,’ I warned her.

‘Do you have much cause to use this?’ Mei
Ling asked, unsheathing the sword and holding it up to the light.

‘There have been occasions when I've had to defend myself …’ I said guardedly.

‘And this sword concealed within an innocent-looking walking stick has proved useful?’ Mei Ling said. ‘Show me.’

She handed the sword to me and stepped back, her arms folded.

‘Show you? But how?’ I shrugged.

‘By touching me on the shoulder with the tip of your blade.’ Mei Ling smiled, her dark eyes glinting mischievously.

‘Just touch you on the shoulder?’ I said, making sure I'd understood.

Mei Ling nodded.

I raised my sword and was about to tap her right shoulder lightly when she stepped to one side. Spinning round, I tried again, only for Mei Ling to swerve elegantly past me, whispering in my ear as she did so.

‘Come on, Barnaby. Try harder …’

I turned and feinted to my left, flicking my sword arm out at the last moment. Mei Ling leaped high to avoid the sword cut, only to land on the tip of the blade for an instant – her elegant slippered foot balanced on tiptoe – before somersaulting over my head. She tapped me on the shoulder, her beautiful face wreathed in smiles.

‘I'm sorry, Barnaby,’ she laughed. ‘I'm showing off. My grandfather says it is my worst trait.’

I turned to her and sheathed my sword. ‘How do you do that?’ I asked, astonished at her acrobatics. ‘My old friend Tom Flint could balance on a rusty gutter two inches wide, but not on the tip of a sword …’

Mei Ling motioned for me to sit at a low table by the window that had been laid for tea.

Sitting down opposite me, she leaned forward and, with a charming frown of
concentration, opened the cork stopper of a tall pot and put one wooden spoonful of the pale green powder it contained into each of the two handleless cups before us. As she did so, a sweet, mossy aroma filled my nostrils. Then, with the same calm attention to detail, she grasped the raffia handle of the bulbous copper teapot, which was steaming gently over a tea light, and poured boiling water into the cups, one after the other. The aroma grew more intense as a thin twist of steam rose up from the surface of the liquid. It was like no tea I had ever smelled before.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Green tea,’ she told me, without looking up. ‘Fortified with ginseng and scented with jasmine.’

Having returned the teapot to the cradle above the flickering flame of the tea light, she picked up a small whisk, fashioned from wood and dried twine, and gently beat the liquid before laying the whisk to one side.
I reached out to take the steaming cup of tea in front of me – only to be stilled by Mei Ling.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘First, look into the steam that rises from the tea. See how it twists and writhes … Really concentrate, Barnaby … Concentrate …’ Mei Ling's voice whispered hypnotically in my ear.

I did what she said. As I stared at the ever-shifting column of dancing mist, something strange started to take place. It was as though the wisps of steam were taking on a certain solidity – like silken scarves, like dragonfly wings, like a fountain rising up into the air and disappearing.

‘Now, look into the spaces in the mist …’

Sure enough, I found my gaze focusing on the spaces – like long tunnels opening up and spiralling away into the distance – between those twisting, writhing wisps of steam …

‘Barnaby …’ I heard my name filtering into my consciousness. ‘Barnaby …’ Mei
Ling's voice was soft and melodic, and it was followed by the sound of hands lightly clapping. ‘Barnaby Grimes.’

I looked up to see Mei Ling staring back at me, her eyes sparkling with amusement. She clapped her hands a second time, in that curious way of hers, as if wiping dust from her fingers.

‘M … Mei Ling,’ I said softly. I felt almost as though I was wakening from sleep.

‘That is your first lesson in yinchido.’ She smiled, handing me the teacup.

‘Yinchido?’ I said, taking a sip of the tea. It tasted as good as it smelled.

‘Yinchido,’ she repeated. ‘The Way of the Silver Mist. It is an ancient art that has been practised for centuries in the remote mountains of my homeland. The art of absence …’

‘I … I don't understand,’ I said.

Mei Ling took a sip of her tea. ‘You have already glimpsed the principle of yinchido
when you looked into the gaps in the steam.’

I looked down at my gently steaming teacup.

‘You see, Barnaby,’ she went on, ‘we use our senses to detect sights, sounds, smells … But the world is more than that. It is also about what
isn't
there.’

I frowned.

‘There is what we
can
see, but also what we
cannot
see. There are sounds, but there is also silence. There is touch,’ she said, reaching out and running the tip of a finger down my cheek. She smiled and pulled away. ‘But there is also the feeling of not being touched. To understand either properly, we must know both. Most people only experience what their senses tell them is there. Yinchido teaches us to appreciate what isn't there – the spaces.’

My head spun as I tried to grasp exactly what she was saying.

‘So,’ I said, ‘in a fight, you would step into the spaces to avoid an attacker? Just as you did to avoid my sword – and when those two great oafs attacked you the other day …’

Mei Ling nodded.

‘But then you didn't just
avoid
their attacks,’ I pursued. ‘You seemed to control their minds …’

Mei Ling looked intently into my eyes. ‘As I told you, Barnaby, yinchido is about using spaces,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘Physical spaces are one thing, but there are also mental spaces. I stepped into the mental spaces of those two bad men and filled them with my own wishes …’

‘You make it sound so simple,’ I said in awe.

‘The Way of the Silver Mist is a long path, Barnaby,’ she told me softly. ‘But if you wish to take it, I would be happy to be your guide.’

I nodded enthusiastically and took another
sip of the tea, only for my stomach to rumble with hunger.

‘I almost forgot, I brought you these,’ I laughed, reaching into my pockets and pulling out the Stover's pasties. ‘I find they're excellent at filling empty spaces!’

An hour later, I climbed out of the attic window of the laundry with a bundle of crisp, pressed shirts and waistcoats, a jar of green tea and a set of instructions from my beautiful guide.

Each morning I brewed my own tea and concentrated on the steam rising as it cooled. Each evening I sat on the rooftop of my attic rooms and practised the breathing exercises Mei Ling had given me, searching for pockets of silence lurking in amidst the noise of the city as I did so.

Strange as it may seem, as that long hot summer passed, these simple techniques began to make a difference. My highstacking
benefited for a start. I no longer seemed to take the tumbles and falls that every high-stacker must expect in the course of his rounds and, with the absence of cuts and bruises, I became more confident of even the trickier manoeuvres. My swordplay improved too, although I also found I could anticipate and avoid trouble far more easily as my powers of concentration grew. And finally, I was never without a stack of freshly laundered shirts.

Mei Ling was so pleased with my progress that she began to teach me about the power of the mind and yinchido techniques to enhance it. It was fascinating stuff and I was looking forward to an enlightening autumn with my beautiful guide.

Unfortunately, that was not to be. Dark forces were at work, an ancient evil was spreading, and I – for all my yinchido training – didn't see it coming.

Turning the corner into Grevy Lane one
morning late that summer, I walked into a shambling character hurrying in the opposite direction. He looked into my eyes, an expression of abject terror on his face, like a rat in a tuppenny trap.

‘It's you!’ I gasped.

t was none other than the Major, the amiable gatekeeper from Grassington Hall — though until I'd looked into his eyes, I hadn't recognized him, so dramatically had he changed.

He was unwashed, dishevelled and as pungent as a tomcat, and there were deep scratches on his head and hands. His once neat side-whiskers were matted and filthy, his waxed moustache now bristled like a scullery maid's broom, while his face was so haggard it looked as if he hadn't slept for a year. There were buttons missing from his jacket, and a tear in one of the knees of his
breeches, the frayed tatters of cloth fringed with dried blood where he'd fallen and cut his leg.

‘Little horrors, little horrors, little horrors …’ he was muttering to himself as he brushed against my shoulder, and he would have passed me by if I hadn't grabbed the sleeve of his jacket with an outstretched arm.

‘You're the Major, from Grassington Hall, aren't you?’ I asked him.

At the sound of my words, the poor man froze. He turned his head slowly towards me, until his terrified gaze was fixed on my own eyes. His gaunt face went as white as a pastry-cook's apron and the right side of his mouth began to twitch involuntarily.

‘The gatekeeper,’ I persisted. ‘At Grassington Hall?’

The man looked stricken. He started back, fine beads of sweat on his forehead. ‘Y-you're not …’ he stammered. ‘You're not one of
them, are you?’ His voice was low, tremulous, and so full of dread you'd have thought he'd just seen a ghost.

‘Them?’ I said.

‘I'm not going back there.’ He trembled, his eyes taking on a hunted, panic-stricken look. ‘Never, you hear me? Never …’ His voice was becoming hysterical. ‘And they can't make me …’

With those words, he tore my hand from his sleeve and pushed past me. Out of the alley he clattered, his hobnail boots skidding on the cobbles as he ran, before darting out across the road – straight into the path of an oncoming coach-and-four which, at that exact moment, came thundering round the corner.

‘Watch out!’ I bellowed.

But too late. A moment later, there was a thud, a crunch and an agonized scream, followed by panicked whinnying, and the sound of the coachman cracking his whip
and bellowing for his rearing horses to calm down.

‘Easy there!
Easy!
’

The stamping of hooves and rattle of the iron wheels came to an abrupt standstill. I looked across the pavement, my heart in my mouth, to see the gatekeeper lying motionless in the gutter, one arm twisted behind his head, his legs broken and crumpled beneath him, and a line of blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. Passers-by rushed over to see what could be done, but as I joined them, I already knew it was hopeless.