“Building a case isn’t the same as winning one. There must be records, transactions.”
The demon snorted and rolled its dreadful eyes, yet it remained silent. My mind was working feverishly. Who was this man who consorted with demons? My attention was caught by his next words.
“So Lim Tian Ching is proceeding well with his task?”
“If you mean, proceeding as he wishes, then I suppose the answer is yes.”
“And with those of the court?”
“The directives were not very clear.”
The man paused for a moment. “Much to Lim’s advantage, no doubt.”
“Yes, but if you check the official records . . .”
“I know what the official records say. There is nothing untoward in them. Anything else?”
“The girl has gone.”
The man nodded. “I know. Tell me something else.”
“He has given orders to recapture her if possible.”
“The girl is a distraction. But she may yet prove to our advantage if he is occupied in that direction.”
“Then I should continue with my surveillance?”
“Yes. We’ll meet again at the usual place and time.”
The demon lowered its great horned head, the wicked tines glinting in the fading light. Then it sprang away at great speed. I heard once again the sound of vegetation being broken and crushed but could no longer see it. Only the faint roasted stench remained.
I remained frozen on my branch, trying to make sense of this peculiar conversation. There was no doubt that my fate was involved, but how? And who were these people? I peered at the man below again but he remained a cipher, his entire head hidden by the wide bamboo hat. With the onset of darkness, however, I began to see a faint glow about him, the slightest shimmer of a spirit light. I hugged the branch tighter, wondering whether I dared follow him to his next destination. After all, he hadn’t noticed me earlier. I had just worked up enough courage to begin sliding down the tree when the man spoke again.
“You can come out now.”
Chapter 18
There was no escape for me. Mortified, I jumped the last ten feet, landing softly on the sand. That at least I was thankful for. If I had fallen into the swamp it would have been the final humiliation. The stranger stood with arms folded, his face still shielded by his bamboo hat with its curiously large and turned down brim.
“You knew I was there all the time,” I said at last.
He cocked his head to one side. “If you want to follow someone, you ought not to do so at such a pantingly close range.”
Stung, I said, “I didn’t know you could see me.”
“Of course I could see you.”
“But you didn’t say anything.”
“I was wondering what you were planning to do. Beg for clemency perhaps?”
“Why should I beg you for anything?”
“No? That seemed like a logical thing to do.”
“I don’t even know who you are!” I cried in frustration. “Or what you are, I suppose.”
“Ah, the risks of going incognito.” The beautiful voice turned ironic. It had a clear, rippling quality that was mesmerizing.
“Never mind,” he said. “I suppose I gave you too much credit for discernment. After all, you’ve been following me. There must have been some reason for that.”
“I’ve seen you before.”
“The medium, I suppose. And at the Lim mansion. I wondered whether you remembered.”
My annoyance got the better of me. “If you really want to remain incognito, then you ought to change your clothes.”
“My clothes?”
“And . . . and that ridiculous hat.”
I caught the gleam of teeth from the shadowy recesses of the hat. “The sartorial fault is mine, no doubt. Although I must say that your own taste is also suspect.”
Glancing down at the pajamas that Amah had changed my body into, I colored.
“Well, let us begin again, then,” he said. “Now that we’ve introduced ourselves with the requisite compliments.”
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “You may well know who I am, but I still lack the honor of your name.”
“My name is not so important, but very well, I am Er Lang.”
Although he said it wasn’t significant, there was no doubt that he was expecting some sort of reaction. Unfortunately I was unable to give him any. Er Lang was the plainest sort of name, if you could call it a name. It simply meant Second Son.
“And how do you know about me?” I asked.
“Are you always so impatient?”
“I’m just a little anxious. You would be too if someone was discussing you with a demon.” A part of me was warning myself not to antagonize him, but I couldn’t bite my tongue. Despite his hidden features, I wasn’t as intimidated as I should perhaps have been, accustomed as I was to my father’s ruined looks.
“So you know about the demons. You’ve certainly been getting about.”
“They were guarding my house; I could hardly go and hide in my room!” Careful, I thought. But he merely shrugged.
“Good. You’re more resourceful than I thought.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means that you may be useful to me.”
I felt myself bristle, just like the fighting cockerels you see for sale in the market. Although trussed by the legs and wings for transportation, the vendors often shake them a little at one another to demonstrate their fierceness. That was exactly how I felt at that moment. After all, I had very little to lose, having no body anymore. But I told myself not to be foolish. There might be other things, worse still, that could be inflicted upon the spirit. In the meantime, the stranger seemed to have arrived at some sort of decision.
“Come,” he said. “Let us walk a little.”
The sea was dark and placid, and the moon’s faint light was just beginning to silver the sand. The man walked at an easy pace and we fell in step with each other as if we were old friends going for a stroll. After a while I noticed that while I made no footprints in the sand, he left a neat, elegant track behind him. That was why I had mistaken him for an ordinary person. When we had walked for some time in silence, he said to me in an almost companionable manner, “No questions, then?”
“I didn’t know that I had leave to ask.”
“Self-control is a quality I’ve always admired. Especially in a woman.”
“Well, then,” I said. “Who are you really, and why are you interested in Lim Tian Ching? You’re not a ghost, are you?”
“As for that, you may think of me as another kind of entity.” Amusement tinged his voice. “Perhaps it would be better to describe me as a minor official.”
“An official in the afterlife?”
“Of sorts. What do you know about the afterlife?”
Briefly, I recounted what I had discovered from Fan and the other ghosts I had encountered. When I had finished he nodded, the enormous bamboo hat moving like a shadowy bat. “Not bad,” he said. “Quite good work for two days.”
I might have been more pleased if he hadn’t sounded so condescending, but he continued in the same cool tone. “The afterlife, as you’ve no doubt discovered, is governed fairly strictly. There are rules about the passage of human ghosts through this world and on to their next reincarnations.”
The way he said this made me shiver. Suddenly, I was certain that I was in the presence of something completely foreign to me, not human at all, in fact. I wondered uneasily what he was concealing beneath the hat.
“One of the ministries oversees the Courts of Hell. A safeguard, you may say, to ensure the system is not abused. When you have unhappy ghosts and quantities of hell money floating around, you can hardly expect there to be no corruption.”
“Are you from heav
en, then?” I asked, thinking with chagrin about how I had gone around pretending to be from the peach orchards of paradise myself.
“Not at all. Consider me a mere tool. A special investigator, if you will.”
“And are you investigating Lim Tian Ching?”
“I see you’ve put your eavesdropping to good use. Lim Tian Ching has exhibited some rather suspicious behavior.”
“What has he done?”
“His case has certain indicators of bribery and coercion, part of a pattern that has surfaced recently. In other words, one of the Nine Judges of Hell is probably corrupt. Oh, they all are, to some degree,” he added. “But it would be well to discover how serious it is, who is raising money and recruiting soldiers. For when the cycle of violence escapes its confines in hell, it causes earthquakes, floods, and other calamities. Don’t you remember the eruption of Krakatau?”
Krakatau was the volcano that had erupted in Indonesia in 1883. I remembered my father’s accounts of the tremendous sound of the explosion, and how the skies had turned black for days with a rain of bitter ash, even though Malaya was far away from the Sunda Straits. The lava flow was so intense that the entire island was decimated of all living creatures. Passengers on boats and steamships reported seeing human skeletons awash at sea upon pillows of floating pumice stone, even up to a year after the eruption.
“Krakatau was the physical manifestation of a rebellion in hell. Though it was suppressed, not all the conspirators were identified. But if another uprising were to upset the spiritual balance of this world, it wouldn’t be just natural disasters that occurred. The moral equilibrium will slip and shift so that nations will turn their thoughts to war. The world may yet burn from China to Europe, and even in the jungles of Malaya.”
His voice had dropped, as though he were speaking to himself. A cold tendril snaked into my heart and I was struck by how insignificant my problems seemed in comparison. I was merely one soul cut adrift from its body. What would it be like if there were thousands, or hundreds of thousands like me? An image of the dead, floating like withered leaves on the surface of the water came to me, and I had the sudden urge to catch hold of Er Lang’s sleeve. His presence, strange as it was, was a comfort to me in the darkness.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked at last.
When he spoke again, his tone was flippant, as though he were embarrassed at having said too much. “It has very little to do with you; the merest coincidence. It happened that I was interested in Lim Tian Ching’s movements, and his interest, apparently, also included you.”
“If you have any special dispensation,” I said hopefully, “perhaps you can return me to my body.”
“Unfortunately, that is beyond my powers,” he said, and the beautiful voice sounded genuinely regretful. “Your dislocation occurred as a result of something you did yourself.”
“But it was an accident!”
“Was it?” he said, and the way he said it made me squirm.
“Well, I didn’t mean to. And couldn’t you say that Lim Tian Ching drove me to it?”
“It’s possible you could make a case for it. But that would have to come up before the Courts of Hell. They may well decide to give you another chance if the ruling goes against Lim Tian Ching.”
“But how would I do that?”
“Gather evidence of his wrongdoing. And then, of course, make sure that you don’t get assigned to the wrong judge.”
“That seems to dovetail rather too well with your own investigation,” I said.
“Well, if you can find out what Lim Tian Ching is doing, together with some sort of proof, then perhaps I can also help with the direction of your case.”
“He told me that he was murdered, and that he had a task to perform in return for his revenge,” I said, unsure about whether to mention the accusation. But if Tian Bai were truly innocent, perhaps we could clear his name.
“Did he now? He’s not supposed to be dispensing justice by himself, even if he really was murdered. There’s a reason why the courts exist. One assumes that your ghost marriage to him is probably another perk of his obedience. I have my spies, as you’ve no doubt realized, but they have their limitations.”
We had turned inland, the path climbing above the beach and toward the trees. The balmy night was redolent with champaka flowers, one or two of whose modest blooms can perfume an entire room. A few stars hung low in the sky. I sighed, wishing Tian Bai was at my side instead of this acerbic, light-footed stranger. I had been studying him covertly and still had no sense of what he looked like. His movements were swift and limber, his form elegant in the old-fashioned clothes that suited him so well. But his face was a mystery to me. Perhaps there were no features beneath his hat at all, merely a skull with loose ivory teeth or a monstrous lizard with baleful eyes.
When we reached the top of the rise, my guide said, “For a young woman, you seem to have a rare gift for silence.” This wasn’t something I had ever noticed about myself, but I didn’t wish to puncture his illusions.
“And are you often surrounded by chattering women?” I ventured.
He shuddered. “I find their attentions very tiresome.”
I choked at this display of vanity. Unbidden, the image of shrieking women fleeing from a monster rose in my mind, but he only said, “So, do you think you can discover what Lim Tian Ching has been up to?”
“And how should I do that? Walk up to his house and tell him I’m ready for the wedding?”
“It’s not a bad idea at all. Go to his house. See what you can discover.”
I stared hard at the darkness beneath the brim of his hat, wondering if he was joking. “But the Lim mansion is probably guarded by demons now.”
“True, but that’s not what I meant. I was referring to his other house.”
I was silent for a moment. “You mean the Plains of the Dead.”
“Of course. He won’t expect that at all.”
“Why don’t you go?”
“Because I can’t. The Plains of the Dead is for human souls, a transitional place that is a shadow of the real world, for without it the shock from life to death is too great for some.”
The Plains of the Dead. From the moment I had heard of it from Fan, I had been drawn to that place. Was it because my spirit was now edging closer to death? But I had very few options left. “I’ll go,” I said at last. “If it will help my case. But can you give me any aid? Any spirit money or a steed?”
“Those are human goods that I have no traffic in. But I will give you something better.”
He slipped his hand into his robe and brought out a shining flat disk, tapering to one end like a flower petal. Grasping it, I was astonished to find that it was a scale, but one so large that I could not imagine what sort of creature had shed it. It was about the size of the palm of my hand, smoothly marked with grooved lines from one direction and culminating in a razor-sharp frill on the other edge. In the moonlight it shone like mother of pearl, so glossy that it looked as though it was wet, though when I drew my finger across it, it was perfectly dry.
“It is a means to call me. Far better than spirit money, don’t you think?” He was so pleased with himself that I had to restrain myself from rolling my eyes.
“But you can’t go to the Plains of the Dead.”
“Well yes, but there are other areas where I may be of help. I’m sure a resourceful girl like you can easily find a way to the plains.” His wry tone made me wonder whether he knew about Fan and her offer to me. “You must hold it up and blow upon the rippled edge. Then call my name and, if I can, I will come to you.”
To my surprise, we were fast approaching the outskirts of town. Er Lang had led me by a direct route, cutting back like a bird on a wing. When I glanced behind me at the path we had taken, however, I could no longer see it. All that remained was the dark sighing mass of trees and the wais
t-high spears of lalang. I wondered whether I had been dreaming, so clearly could I picture the pale glint of sandy soil upon that winding path, but the route behind us looked impassable.
“Now,” he said, pausing before the sea of roofs below us. Oil lamps burned in some windows, and with my sharp vision I could see the faint miasma of green and blue spirit lights in the darkened streets. “Can you manage from here?”
I hesitated. “Yes. As for money and a carriage . . . ” I shrugged hopelessly.
“You’ve already done far better than you can imagine,” said Er Lang in a surprisingly kind tone. “There’s one thing more to remember. Time in the Plains of the Dead doesn’t pass at the same rate as it does here. The rate isn’t constant; it ebbs and flows, but in general it will be faster than time here. That is how someone may die one night and be reborn the next day, yet have spent months or even years in the Plains of the Dead. I won’t lie to you. There is a certain amount of danger. In fact I’m not even sure you can enter the plains since you’re not quite dead yourself.”
“And if I can’t?”
He shrugged. “Then we must try another tactic. But I shall remember your service to me, regardless.” I opened my mouth to ask him another question, but he forestalled me. “If you manage to go to the Plains of the Dead, don’t trust anyone. And don’t eat anything. You still have a living body, which is a great advantage for it strengthens you beyond what the dead are capable of.”
“If I don’t eat spirit food, won’t I wither away?”
“But if you wish to return to the living, it is better not to dilute your spirit with the food of the dead.”
“That’s what Old Wong said.”
“Who is that?”
“Our cook.”
He waved his sleeve in disdain. “Yes, well. Just remember what I said. But I must go now. I have tarried too long and there are other urgent matters at hand.”
A dozen more questions sprang to my lips, but at that moment there was a great rushing sound. A strong wind buffeted me, stirring up the leaves and branches in a whirling maelstrom. I closed my eyes against this onslaught and when I opened them again, Er Lang was gone. Far off in the night sky I saw a streak of light undulating like an eel in the ocean, but it passed so swiftly that I wondered whether I had imagined it.