down the law to admiring underlings, and she smiled so beautifully that it took my breath away. A delicate hand slipped inside her tunic. Wong's sandfilled sock reached the back of her head just as the point of her dagger reached the bureaucrat's throat. She descended to the floor as gracefully as a falling leaf, and one of the scholars glanced up from his dice game.
“Got her again, Wong,” he said.
“One of these days I'm going to miss,” One-Eyed Wong said gloomily.
The bureaucrat gazed down at the lovely body and saw who she was and turned green. “Buddha protect me!” he howled, and he charged out the door so hastily that he left his purse on the table, which the underlings grabbed and divided. Wong picked up the princess and took her to the side door, and the last I saw of her she had been collected by a pair of liveried servants and was being carried away in a silken sedan chair.
“So much for premonitions,” I said to myself.
Master Li was turning purple. “What a world we live in,” he said, breathing heavily through his nose. “Ox, that exquisite girl is Lady Hou, who happens to be one of the three finest poets in the empire. In any civilized age she would be honored and decorated and praised to the skies, but ours is the age of the Neo-Confucians.”
He smashed the table so hard that his wine jar bounced up in the air, and I caught it before the contents could spill on his robe and burn holes in it.
“Fraud, Ox!” he said furiously. “We live in a land so debased that its most valued art forms are fraud and forgery. The Neo-Confucians cannot accept the fact that a mere woman could be so gifted, and they, of course, control the Imperial Censors, who control publication. They graciously consented to publish the lady's poems, and to her amazement she saw the author's credit: „Attributed to Yang Wan-li.“ That is really quite clever. The implication being that somebody was faking a masculine classical style, and by officially classifying genuine work as fraudulent, they have, in effect, deprived Lady Hou of her identity. She's been destroying her mind with Thunderballs and slitting Neo-Confucian throats ever since, but there are simply too many of them. They'll win in the end. Eventually she'll be convinced that she really doesn't exist, and is actually a teapot or something in that general price range, and then they'll lock her up and the head Neo-Confucian will suavely appropriate her poetry as his own.
He downed his wine at a gulp, and signaled Fat Fu for some more.
„My boy,“ he said gloomily, „we live in the last days of a once great civilization. Dry rot has set in, so we paint it with lies and gild it with fool's gold, and one of these days the whole works will blow away in a high wind and where an empire once flourished there'll be nothing but a bunch of bats flying in and out of a bunghole.“
He was depressed but I was cheered. I knew with a certainty I couldn't explain that my premonition had been correct after all, and I had simply focused on the wrong person. I suppose it had to do with the terror in the voice I heard—I couldn't see who it was, but somebody was working his way through the crowd, and he was chanting the same incomprehensible words over and over again. Even Master Li looked up from his wine jar and took notice.
„Interesting,“ he said, with a faint sign of animation. „One doesn't often hear ancient Sanskrit. The Great Prayer of the Heart Sutra, to be precise: Gyate, gyate, haras, yate, harosogyate, bochi, sowaka! which means „Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, what an awakening, hail!“ Nobody can explain why it should be, but the prayer has an extraordinarily soothing effect when one repeats it over and over.“
Then we saw him, and I was disappointed. I had expected a wild-eyed barbarian, but he was only a bonze. He was small and pale and appeared to be frightened half to death, and he was looking desperately around the room. His eyes fastened upon Master Li like a pair of limpets, and he scuttled up and fell to his knees and began kowtowing energetically.
„Bl-bl-blpp-blppt,“ he said, or something like that.
„If you stopped trying to bang a hole in the floor with your chin, you might be more comprehensible,“ Master Li said, not unkindly. „Why not stand up and try it again?“
The monk jumped up and bowed as jerkily as a kou-tou beetle. „Have I the honor of addressing the great and mighty Master Li, foremost among the scholars and truth seekers of China?“ he squealed.
Master Li brushed away the compliments with a modest wave of a hand. „My surname is Li and my personal name is Kao, and there is a slight flaw in my character,“ he said. This is my esteemed former client and current assistant, Number Ten Ox. You got a problem?”
The monk struggled for some semblance of self-control. “Venerable Sir, I am the humble abbot of the insignificant monastery in the Valley of Sorrows. You have heard of our valley?”
“Who hasn't?” said Master Li.
I hadn't.
“We have lived in peace for centuries, but now one of my monks has been murdered in a terrible and impossible manner,” the abbot said with a shudder. “Our library has been broken into, and something has happened to trees and plants that must be seen to be believed.”
He had a fit of trembling, and it took him some time to get more words out.
“O Master Li, the Laughing Prince has arisen from the grave,” he whispered.
“Well, he always said he'd return, although he seems to have taken his time about it,” Master Li said calmly. “How long has the aristocratic son of a sow been in his tomb?”
“Seven hundred and fifty years,” the abbot whispered.
Master Li poured himself another cup of wine. “Punctuality is not a priority of princes,” he observed. “What makes you think this one has returned to his old playpen?”
“He has been seen. I myself have seen him dancing and laughing in the moonlight with his murderous companions, and when we found the body of poor Brother Squint-Eyes, the expression on his face bore witness to the presence of the Laughing Prince. We found this clutched in his hand, and a search of the library revealed that the manuscript had been stolen.”
The abbot timidly offered a fragment of ancient parchment. Master Li gazed at it casually, and then he froze. Not a muscle twitched in his face, but my heart skipped a beat. I knew what it meant when his body was as still as a boulder and his eyes were almost hidden by wrinkles that could have formed a relief map of all China.
“Anything else?” Master Li asked calmly.
“The little monk was close to fainting. He was being squeezed by a memory that made his eyes bulge from his head, and his voice was strangled.
„There was a sound,“ he whispered. „I cannot describe that sound. It turned half the monks to jelly, yet the other half couldn't hear it at all. Those who heard were forced to follow the sound. We had no will of our own. It led us to a scene of destruction that cannot be described in words. It was a sound that seemed to come from Heaven yet had the effect of the worst fires of Hell, and I knew at once that I must come to the greatest resolver of riddles in all the empire.“
Master Li turned the fragment over and examined the back of it. „What do you know about the stolen manuscript?“ he asked.
The abbot blushed. „I am no scholar. I couldn't read a word of it,“ he said humbly. „Brother Squint-Eyes, the murdered monk, was our librarian, and he said it was ancient but not valuable. A curiosity that was probably intended to be a footnote to a history.“
„How large was it?“
The abbot formed the shape of a scroll with his hands, about a foot high and a fifth of an inch thick.
„What has happened to the body of Brother Squint-Eyes?“
„There is some ice left in our cold room, so I had the body placed upon it,“ the abbot said. „Venerable Sir, ours is a poor order, but you will have heard of Prince Liu Pao. I have written him, and he is on his way, and I assure you he will pay whatever—”
Master Li held up a hand. “That may not be necessary,” he said. “Suppose I were to offer my services, including all expenses, in return for this fragment of the manuscript?”
“Done!” the abbot cried.
The thought of having Master Li take over did wonders, and the little fellow was instantly twenty years younger. It was settled in a matter of minutes. The abbot had to return to his monastery at once, and Master Li promised to set forth toward the Valley of Sorrows the following day. The abbot got a bad nosebleed from banging his chin against the floor as he crawled backward from the table, but his face was joyful when he hopped up and ran out to bring the good news to his monks. Master Li watched him go like a fond grandfather.
“Well, Ox, what do you make of this?” he said.
