dinner.
“Master Li, that city was destroyed in an instant!” I gasped. “If the Duke of Ch'in was responsible for such a massacre, he must have the coldest heart in the world!”
Li Kao grabbed my arm. “Repeat that,” he ordered.
“Er… if the Duke of Ch'in is responsible, he must have the coldest heart in the world,” I mumbled.
The expression on Li Kao's face was rather odd, and I decided that he reminded me of a cat that was creeping up behind a large complacent bird. He waved at the thicket of towers and spires.
“Ox, this is another labyrinth, and we no longer have the dragon pendant,” he said. “But do we need it? It occurs to me that when the Old Man of the Mountain told us about the stupidity of some of his pupils, he may have been slyly saying something about the Duke of Ch'in.”
Li Kao hurriedly greased his body and grabbed his diving equipment.
“After all, the wisest man in the world could scarcely be pleased with a pupil who chose a vast city as the hiding place for his heart, buried it beneath hundreds of feet of water, and then left a path that would lead straight to the rather peculiar nature of the extracted organ. Ox, lead me to that strange icy current,” purred Master Li.
28. The Coldest Heart in the World
We drifted down into the eerie greenish glow, and in a minute I found the current. It nearly froze us to death before we learned that we could follow it from a safe distance by watching a tiny trail of bubbles. We followed it for hours, through a tangled maze of streets. I would swim back up to the surface and paddle the raft ahead, and then Master Li would break water and climb on board, and we would rest and replenish our air bladders. We were slowly working our way toward the center of the city, and in late afternoon we paddled the raft toward a copper dome that lifted through the water in the center of four stone towers. A boulder from the fallen cliff had crashed through the dome, and that trail of tiny bubbles was oozing up through the hole.
We squeezed through the hole and drifted down toward a pile of treasure that was so huge that it was ten times larger than the other hoards added together!
Above the loot was a large copy of the duke's tiger mask, hanging upon a stone wall. The tiger's mouth was wide open, and behind the teeth was a niche where the choicest gems were piled. I swam closer and saw that the gems were heaped around a golden casket, and my heart leaped joyfully when I saw that the bubbles were trickling out from the keyhole. My hand reached out, but Li Kao grabbed it. He nodded urgently at the mask. I noticed that the tiger's teeth were pointed steel, and I swam to one of the towers and managed to pry a stone slab from the wall. I swam back and shoved it between the terrible jaws.
The teeth snapped together and began grinding through the stone with a screech that seemed to be magnified by the water, but the stone held long enough for me to reach through the gap and grab the casket. I dropped it into a sack that was tied to my waist, just as the stone dissolved into powder and the teeth snapped shut with a terrible crash. We turned to swim back to the surface, and my heart nearly stopped beating. Three pearly figures were drifting toward us in the greenish glow, and if I had not had the breathing tube in my mouth I would have cried out in pity. They were the three murdered handmaidens of the Princess of Birds, and their bodies were uncorrupted after all the centuries, and the horror in their eyes was blended with a strange helpless pleading. They moved through the water like fish, with small wriggles of their hips and legs, and their long black hair drifted behind them like clouds.
The hair defied the pressure of the water. It reached out in front of the girls and floated toward us like masses of snakes. The cold wet coils curled around our breathing tubes and jerked them from our mouths, and then the tendrils closed around our faces and clogged our mouths and noses. We turned turtle and dived, and jerked out the second pig bladders and inserted the breathing tubes in our mouths, and then we flipped over and swam back up, thrusting at the girls with our bamboo spears. We were wasting our time. The limp bodies had been lifeless for centuries, and the clouds of hair passed through the spears and reached out again. The second tubes were ripped from our mouths and air bubbled away from the bladders. Again we dived, and we inserted the tubes of our last bladders, but even as I fixed my tube in my mouth I felt heavy coils of writhing wet hair crawl over my shoulders. Then the last tubes were ripped away. I thrust desperately at the handmaidens, and I saw that their pleading eyes appeared to be weeping, but their hair lifted to form an impenetrable cloud. We could not pass.
I grabbed Master Li and swam to the tower and used my spear to pry out another stone slab. The hole was just big enough, and I shoved Master Li through it and squeezed in after him and wedged the spear in the gap to delay the handmaidens. I jerked rocks from our belts and we began to rise. My lungs were bursting, and my eardrums were exploding, and my eyeballs seared with pain. I was nearly unconscious when our heads broke through the surface of the water into a small air pocket just below the copper roof. I held Li Kao's head above water while I gulped air, and I screamed when it touched my tortured lungs. Finally I could breathe well enough to start thinking again, and I saw that the wall to my left had nearly crumbled into nothingness. A few kicks knocked a hole in it, and I carried Li Kao through the hole and climbed up upon the flat roof.
Master Li was an inert weight in my arms. I laid him on his face and began to apply artificial respiration. I wept when I thought that it was too late, but I soon heard him cough. I cried out for joy and kept at it while water spurted from his mouth, and finally he began breathing on his own. Then I fell back on the roof and we lay side by side, gasping like beached fish. Finally we were able to sit up and look around, and we saw that we were still in bad trouble. It was more than a mile to the shore, and those handmaidens were swimming around the tower like sharks. Master Li pounded some water from his ears and pointed a quivering finger.
“Number Ten Ox, we are witnessing a crime so terrible as to transcend belief,” he said hoarsely. “The Duke of Ch'in murdered those poor girls, and then he bound them with a spell that would force them to defend the heart of their murderer. Since he fully intends to live forever, he has sentenced three innocent girls to eternal damnation.”
He was so angry that he was turning purple.
“Not even the Emperor of Heaven has the right to sentence anyone to eternal damnation!” he said furiously. “There must be a trial, and the accused must be defended, and the Yama Kings must concur in the verdict before such a terrible sentence can be imposed!”
I growled and pulled the casket from the sack at my waist. When I held the icy thing to my ear I heard a faint thump… thump… thump…
“Shall I slice it or squeeze it?” I snarled.
The question was academic. Li Kao went to work with his lockpicks, but he had never encountered a lock like that one. It was the most complicated pressure lock that he had ever seen, and nothing but the proper key could open it. A dagger could not scratch the casket. I smashed it to the stone with all the strength that I had, and I couldn't even dent it. Friction could not produce the slightest trace of warmth upon the icy surface. I hurled the casket down and we sat there and stared at it. Apparently when I had grabbed the casket from the niche I had taken a few jewels as well, and Li Kao slowly reached out and picked them up: a diamond, a ruby, a pearl, and an emerald. He stared at them wonderingly.
“Checkmate,” he said softly. “I told you that the August Personage of Jade was going to tie the two quests into a nice neat knot. There is only one way that we can escape from this tower, and we are going to have to make a sacred vow.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“To find a raindrop in a thunderstorm, or a petal in a field of flowers, or a grain of sand concealed among a billion on a beach,” Master Li whispered. “I am a dolt. My poor brains have turned to butter. Ox, since I can no longer trust what I used to call a mind, do you happen to remember the names of the handmaidens of the Princess of Birds?”
“Snowgoose,” I said slowly. “Little Ping… and Autumn Moon.”
Li Kao put the jewels into a seashell on his smuggler's belt and had me replace the casket in the sack and tie it securely to my waist. Then he painfully got to his feet and faced the poor girls who slowly circled the tower.
“Snowgoose,” he said quietly, “Little Ping, Autumn Moon, listen to me. The quest is almost at an end. We have the flute and the ball and the bell. I know where to find the three feathers of the Kings of Birds. I know where to find the golden crown. Now I know where to find the Princess of Birds. You must let us pass. You must fight as
