Li Kao reached into his belt and pulled out the gems that I had picked up along with the casket: a diamond, a ruby, a pearl, and an emerald. He placed them upon the table.
“Key Rabbit, look at this stuff,” he said. “We have been talking about a little boy who lives only for money, yet he employs you as Assessor of Ch'in. You are forced to impose his fines, and collect his share of every transaction, and accompany him on tax trips and determine what every village owes. Night after night he forces you to stay in his treasure chambers and count every penny of his loot. The mysterious Duke of Ch'in, who lives only for money, has arranged matters so that his Assessor must spend far more time with it than he does. Peculiar, isn't it?”
“Lotus Cloud was right. He's crazy,” I said firmly.
“As a matter of fact, he isn't,” Master Li replied. “You see, everything would fit neatly into place—the money, the monsters, the labyrinths and other trappings of fairy tales, the lack of sensible precautions and the ridiculous precautions where none are needed—if the right kind of face were concealed behind the mask. Suppose that hiding behind a terrible snarl of a tiger…”
Master Li leaned forward. His voice was hypnotic, and his eyes were as cold as a cobra's.
“Was the face of a frightened rabbit,” he whispered.
Li Kao's eyes had warned me to leap, and all I needed to know was where. I smashed the Key Rabbit to the floor, and Li Kao's hands darted out and snatched a chain and jerked a key up over the Key Rabbit's head. We had once become entangled in that chain, and at the end of it was a key that was shaped like a flower, with sixteen tiny points. Li Kao pulled a golden casket from beneath his tunic. A casket that contained the heart of the Duke of Ch'in, and that was secured by a pressure lock shaped like a flower, with sixteen tiny slits. Each point had to fit into each slit with precisely the right amount of pressure, and Li Kao's forehead wrinkled with concentration as he applied the key to the lock.
Lotus Cloud, who was not the screaming type, was screaming her head off, and outside in the garden the dogs were going insane. When I lifted from the floor I was not riding upon the back of a man, but on the back of a snarling, clawing tiger.
I was in the best position that I could manage, with my arms wrapped around the tiger's throat and my teeth buried in the fur on its neck, and we went bounding around the room while Master Li struggled with the lock, and I am alive today because the Duke of Ch'in was unquestionably the stupidest of all the pupils of the Old Man of the Mountain. When he discovered that he was not dislodging me as a tiger he transformed himself into a serpent, and then into a wild boar, and then into an enormous spider, and all the while I was praying: “August Personage of Jade, cleanse this idiot's mind of all memory of scorpions!” I could almost feel the lethal tail whipping around to impale me like a bug. “Wipe his brain of all images of porcupines, cacti, quicksand, and carnivorous plants!” I don't know whether or not the August Personage of Jade had anything to do with it, but certainly the duke wasn't reading my mind at the moment because he obligingly transformed himself into a crocodile. Unfortunately, the lashing tail knocked Li Kao beneath a heavy table that collapsed on top of him, and the casket and the key went spinning across the floor. I spat out a mouthful of tiger fur, boar's bristles, spider hair, and crocodile scales.
“Lotus Cloud, open the casket!” I yelled.
The Duke of Ch'in transformed himself into a giant ape. We went bounding around the room again while Lotus Cloud, her eyes glazed with shock, slowly reached down toward the casket at her feet. Then the duke transformed himself into a boulder. We crashed to the floor, and the huge heavy thing slowly rolled over on top of me. I gasped for breath while a pair of pink-rimmed Key Rabbit eyes appeared in the boulder. A pair of Key Rabbit lips opened, and a piece of the rock quivered like a long twitching nose.
“I can grow heavier,” the duke giggled. “Heavier and heavier and heavier.”
The breath was being squeezed out of me, and my ribs were cracking. I could see Li Kao wrestling with the heavy table, and Lotus Cloud dazedly trying to fit the key into the lock. The tip of her tongue protruded from between her lips, and she looked for all the world like a little girl who was trying to thread a needle for the first time. Above me the pink-rimmed eyes were glittering, and I realized that sheer terror was driving the Duke of Ch'in to the edge of insanity, as it had done so often in the past.
“I shall hang you and the old man in a cage beside my bed,” he whispered. “My dear friends shan hsiao shall rip your flesh with their claws and beaks, and your flesh will grow back, and the claws and beaks shall rip it again, and your screams will soothe me to sleep at night, and thus you will spend eternity.”
I had no breath left. The room was swimming before my eyes, and my ears were throbbing with hurtful heartbeat sounds. The boulder grew heavier and heavier, and I could stand it no more.
Lotus Cloud screamed. She screamed so piercingly that a thin porcelain bowl broke in half. The open casket fell to the floor, and a wet throbbing heart lay sickeningly at her feet.
In an instant the boulder had become the Key Rabbit, and he frantically tried to reach his heart. I clung to his ankles with the last bit of strength that I had, and he wailed in fear as he slowly dragged me across the floor. The Key Rabbit's hand reached out, and Lotus Cloud watched him with eyes that were wide with horror. Then that marvelous girl reached down and scooped up the slimy thing at her feet, and she wound up in the manner of a peasant girl who had been the terror of crows, and she hurled the heart on a dead line across the room and through the window to the garden. The hysterical guard dogs descended upon the heart of their master.
The Key Rabbit stood quite still. Then he slowly turned to his wife, and he reached out with a strangely tender gesture, and his lips parted. I will never know what he wanted to say. The flesh withered upon the face of the tyrant who had given his name to China, and I stared at the clean white bones of a skull, and then the bones themselves dissolved into the dust of centuries, and an empty robe slowly floated down and settled limply upon the floor.
I managed to crawl over and lift the table from Li Kao, and he staggered to his feet and dived for the wine jar.
“The Yama Kings have been waiting a long time, and I would imagine that the Duke of Ch'in is receiving a rather warm welcome in Hell,” he said when he came up for air.
Master Li handed me the wine jar. I drank deeply and passed it to Lotus Cloud, who swigged like a soldier. The wonder had overcome the horror, and her eyes were wide and bright and filled with marvels. Master Li walked over to the robe on the floor. He bent down and reached inside it, and his right hand lifted with a small golden crown.
“What better place to keep the greatest of all treasures than the hole where a heart had been?” he said.
His left hand lifted, and I cried out in joy as an unbelievably powerful aroma of ginseng reached my nostrils. It was so strong that it revived me in an instant.
“Master Li, has our quest come to an end?” I cried.
“Not quite yet,” he cautioned. “This is indeed the Heart of the Great Root of Power, but we must remember that it is also the Queen of Ginseng. Her Majesty must never be forced. If she is to help the children of Ku-fu, it must be of her own free will, and we must ask her goddaughter to transmit her wishes.”
Master Li clasped his hands together and bowed deeply to Lotus Cloud.
“Meaning your Highness, the Princess of Birds,” he said.
Lotus Cloud stared, but her eyes were not as wide as mine.
“Master Li, you can't be serious!” I gasped.
“I have never been so serious in my life,” he said calmly.
“Me? With my thick legs and flat face?” Lotus Cloud exclaimed. Her sense of the fitness of things was outraged, and she flushed with indignation. “The Star Shepherd fell in love with the most beautiful girl in the world!”
“Mere literary convention,” Li Kao said, with an airy wave of a hand. “Beauty is ridiculously overrated, and if that was all that the Star Shepherd wanted, he had the young goddesses of Heaven to choose from. The Star Shepherd had enough sense to want a peasant girl whose eyes held all the hope and joy and wonder in the world, and whose grin could fell an ox at fifty paces. Ask this ox here,” he said with a wink in my direction. “Ox, remind me to change my business sign so that the eye is nine tenths closed. I should have known that Lotus Cloud was immortal the moment that Miser Shen reacted to her exactly as you did.”
Lotus Cloud stamped her foot. “I refuse to believe one word of this nonsense,” she said angrily.
“Why should you? The Duke of Ch'in took you to the Old Man of the Mountain, who removed your memory,”
