The Nicholas Linnear Novels (219 page)

So-Peng’s plan was brilliant. Using the Singapore police, he did Tak’s work for him, effectively decimating all of Tak’s rival tongs. The other
samseng
could do nothing but acquiesce to Tak’s sovereignty.

In this way, inside a week order was restored in Nightside. Within two weeks a suspect in the multiple brothel murders had been apprehended. The major surprise was that it wasn’t the
samseng
Tik Po Tak at all, but an overly ambitious member of a rival tong. The evidence against the tong member was overwhelming, and the chief of police and the governor made sure that the murderer’s subsequent trial and execution were given maximum exposure. That way the alarmed townsfolk were given a finite focus for their fear and rage.

A month from the day So-Peng was hired, life in Singapore had returned to normal, and So-Peng, at the age of twenty, became the most celebrated man in the Colony.

He had used his gift to bury from sight the murder of his half brother, which he had committed, and the murders he was responsible for planning.

So-Peng had advised Tak to pull his money out of the poppy-growing business. He had, with Tak’s money, begun to buy up acres of land just north of the Colony. He hired H. N. Ridley, the director of the Singapore Botanical Gardens, whom So-Peng had met on the tiger hunt Tak had taken him on on their way to find the tanjian who turned out to be Zhao Hsia.

So-Peng set Ridley to work planting his beloved Para trees, and within five years they had the beginning of what was to be the largest rubber plantation in the area. So-Peng quit his civil post to devote himself full-time to his business. He hired the flat-faced boy he had met in the streets near his house. They soon became friends as close as brothers. He allowed his brothers to come and work for him. His father had recently died of dysentery in Java. There was no word about his mother, although So-Peng spent a great deal of money trying to find her.

Time passed, and while the plantation was developing, So-Peng, still using Tik Po Tak’s tainted money, bought up other businesses, always at the most strategic time—times of stress for the seller.

He met and married a Chinese woman, and like a machine, she began to drop a female child in his lap every year. But still, it seemed, So-Peng was not content. The tanjian elders say that friction developed between So-Peng and Tak as to how to handle the legitimate businesses. The disagreements became protracted, bitter. Tak wanted out, and apparently So-Peng obliged him.

The authorities discovered Tik Po Tak’s bloated corpse floating in the bay one morning. Whatever investigation might have initially arisen was quickly terminated. Even though he had left the police force, So-Peng had maintained close ties with those who had succeeded him…

“But what of the most important part?” Shisei asked. “The tanjian emeralds?”

Ah, the tanjian emeralds, Senjin said. Well, it happens that the tanjian were not idle during the time of their enemy’s consolidation of power. They sent out others after Zhao Hsia failed to return. They saw their mistake. They had assumed that the son of the traitor, Liang, would be able to persuade his mother to return the tanjian emeralds she had stolen from her father. They thought that Zhao Hsia would be able to convince his half brother to return with him to Zhuji to properly begin his studies of Tau-tau, as was his right, and duty.

Instead, only death had come of their attempt at forgiveness.

Still, they were loath to assert the full extent of their power. Both Liang and So-Peng were tanjian. Moreover, they were of the prime lineage, and the imperative to keep them alive overrode even the most energetic arguments to the contrary.

So the tanjian elders sent emissaries to find Liang and her priceless cache of power. All efforts failed. They did not find her or the emeralds. So-Peng and the members of his family were watched to see if they had somehow acquired the gems, but there was no sign that they had. The tanjian even kept watch over So-Peng’s flat-faced friend, now the foreman of the rubber plantation. They observed as So-Peng’s wife died, as he courted and wed a second wife, as she began to deliver sons to him even as, one by one, his daughters died of a virulent plague sweeping the Malaysian peninsula.

The tanjian kept their silent vigil, careful not to interfere, waiting for some sign of the emeralds. What else was there to do?

Zhao Hsia had been telling the truth at the falls. His grandfather, and So-Peng’s, was slowly dying an agonizing death. He needed the power of the emeralds, which were like a magnifying glass or a mantra engine: they absorbed energy from the
kokoro
membrane and stored it. Within those emeralds was the energy of the millennia, growing, bouncing from perfect facet to perfect facet, from gem to identical gem, the repetitions expanding like ripples upon a lake.

The number nine was significant since that number of emeralds set up a complex three-dimensional figure whose angular harmonics actually
multiplied
the energy from the
kokoro
membrane. On the other hand, any number below nine would create another figure, whose discordant angles would actually attack the membrane, robbing it of energy and eventually threatening its very fabric…

“What would happen if the
kokoro
membrane were to shred?” Shisei asked.

Senjin looked at her. “Death would happen,” he said. “Its tone would permeate the silent echoes we hear and which guide us. Death and more death.”

Shisei was seeing someone. It came as a shock to Senjin that time hadn’t stood still while he had been away in Zhuji. He was so self-absorbed that it was difficult to believe that events were not held in limbo when he was not there to affect their outcome.

Senjin never said a word against Shisei’s boyfriend; he didn’t have to. She could feel the oiled steel of his aura darkening like the fall of night, contracting like an adder whenever Jeiji was around.

Jeiji was in his last year of law at Todai, the country’s most prestigious university. He was in the top ten in his class. He was the lucky beneficiary of two of the most important bonds in Japanese society—
gakubatsu,
between classmates, and
kyodobatsu,
between townsfolk—his father went to school with the law-school dean, his mother came from the same prefecture in Nara as the head of Tokyo’s most prestigious law firm. This man had already pledged to hire Jeiji upon his graduation from Todai. And Shisei was in love with Jeiji. Jeiji had everything, except what he needed most—Senjin’s approval.

Jeiji openly adored Shisei. Of course. This was a prerequisite for any relationship she might enter into. The adoration she felt at a distance when the rich spotlights fell upon her must be replicated in more intimate detail, so that she could run her hands over its each and every contour in order to satisfy herself that it really did exist.

Jeiji was made to order for this role. When she had met him, he had been devoted to only one thing: his career. In no time, he had become devoted to Shisei as well. But this was not enough for her. This was perfectly clear to Senjin, although he doubted very much whether it was to his sister. She still saw herself in that exalted virginal state of childhood that existed for them both in Asama; she could not imagine that she had yet within her the seeds of good and evil, let alone the power to wield them. Senjin, of course, knew better.

He watched with studied interest Jeiji’s slow slide into wretchedness. Oh, he was sure that Shisei did not fully understand what effect the projection of her will, that seductive coil of perfume, had on someone such as Jeiji. In fact, Senjin became convinced that she did not even know she was flexing her aura each time Jeiji was drawn deeper under her spell.

Jeiji’s disintegration—the utter dissolution of his sense of himself—came as a delight to Senjin, especially because he saw the young man as a threat, an interruption of the psychic continuity he sought with his sister. And it pleased his heightened sense of irony that he needed to do nothing but sit back and watch Shisei destroy that which she coveted.

Thus it came as a shock to her when Jeiji was thrown out of Todai for his failure to attend classes, hand in the requisite number of papers, participate in the highly intensive series of debates on matters of law that were an integral part of the senior-year curriculum.

Was it possible that Shisei did not understand that her beloved Jeiji could only be in one place at once, that if he was with her he could not be at school or studying or writing his papers? Apparently not. And Jeiji, for his part, had given up all interest in the law. His adoration of Shisei was now slavish; the more he gave her, the more she wanted.

Senjin observed with fascination her sucking him dry. She was as wanton, as reckless as a whore. She flaunted her gift without even knowing it. She was as unconscious about this as Haha-san had been about aspects of herself. The parallel was striking, and the more Senjin thought about it, the more convinced he was that he must save Shisei from herself.

That was when he decided to kill Jeiji.

Well, not just kill him—that would have been useless; worse, foolish—but do it in a meaningful manner, a manner that would bring Shisei out of childhood, that would open her eyes to the reality of what she was and what her gift might cause her to become. After all, he thought (unconsciously, inevitably taking on the mantle of Haha-san), it is my duty. Who will take care of her if I fail to?

And what was going through Shisei’s mind during this time? Was she as oblivious to her effect on Jeiji as she seemed to be? Or was she deliberately blinding herself to the truth of her needs?

What she thought of during this time was neither Jeiji nor Senjin. The impending storm of them both being in her life was beyond her powers of observation.

Her mind was dominated by the monster of Haha-san—whom she loved, whom she still considered running to; climbing upon her lap, pressing her face into the pillows of her breasts to listen to that slowly beating heart, to close her eyes and to sleep in blissful silence.

And yet, like a scrim pulled across a theater stage, the bursts of Haha-san’s emotional violence followed her, pulsing in the darkness of her bedroom, filling the end of the night with pieces of the enigma, bludgeoning her with questions she could not answer: How did I fail her? How could I have pleased her? Does she love me?
Does she love me?

And each time an unanswerable question assailed her, in reflex she asserted the sinuous perfumed coils, drawing them ever tighter around Jeiji.

Long before Senjin decided to kill Jeiji, Shisei was bent on destroying him, but how could she know that? She would not have believed anyone—even Senjin, had he been foolish enough to point it out to her—had they told her. Would she understand that she needed to destroy Jeiji, who adored her so, in order to save herself from the wintry monster of Haha-san, which still blew through her heart, shutting down a part of her each time it asserted itself? Not yet. But soon.

Senjin determined that if Jeiji’s death were to serve a purpose, it would have to serve Tau-tau; it would have to excite the energy at the membrane
kokoro,
the heart of things.

As he set to work, it was not lost on Senjin that Jeiji was in many ways the perfect sacrifice. He was, if not a physical virgin, pure in other ways. His adoration of Shisei was without ulterior motive. When Shisei had met him, he had been a rather arrogant young man, as certain of his superiority to others as he was of his place in the world. Shisei’s sinuous coils had stripped him of his arrogance, of all artifice, in fact; ironically, at the edge of destruction he was a more virtuous human being.

When Senjin killed him, he was as unprotesting as a lamb. Until the last, he was immersed in his adoration of Shisei, oblivious to any and all unrelated stimuli.

Senjin had spent much time deciding on the moment of Jeiji’s demise. But in retrospect he thought that perhaps he had failed to take into account the effect it might have on his sister.

Senjin had a perfect view of working limbs and pumping buttocks as he climbed upon the bed in which they were industriously making love. He would never forget the look in Shisei’s eyes when he wrenched Jeiji’s head right around, snapping the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. He was reminded of saplings snapping in a stiff wind.

Shisei’s eyes were pale—which they always were when she was making love—and they stared into Senjin’s with a combination of shock, disbelief, and horror. It was this last that, later, made Senjin think that he had made a mistake in his timing.

The truth was, in this he had been selfish, wanting this much for himself, to interrupt forever the one act Jeiji could perform with Shisei that was forbidden him. It was a dream he created out of smoke and spun thought as he pushed Jeiji off Shisei, rising over her so that his shadow fell across her naked body, entering its mysterious hollows as his body could not.

Shisei covered herself as if he were some leering stranger, and this hurt him terribly, so that now he tasted only his own bile in his mouth, and he considered giving it up, throwing away this opportunity to gather power to him, to teach his sister about herself, to force her to grow up.

She spit into his face, and Senjin hit her. Then, because she was becoming unaccountably hysterical, he bound her wrists behind her back, her ankles with strips ripped from her own silk pajamas.

The chanting of the ancient runes had already begun in his head. Now he spoke them, the repetitions turning the air dark, setting it to vibrating. He worked to prepare them both for what was to come, as Shisei stared wide-eyed at him, shouted invective at him. That was repetition, too, and served his purpose, so he did not hit her again. Besides, she would soon enough understand what she might have become without his intervention.

This was at a time before he had forged his own blades. He used a factory-made knife, kneeling before Jeiji’s corpse and ritually stripping the flesh from it. Shisei’s eyes bugged, she made little choked, clicking noises in her throat. Then she vomited. But she could not avert her gaze, could not even voice her opposition to what he was doing.