learning to control the creature with sounds from a stone—thirteen going on ninety, with the heart of a hangman.
The hangman's eyes softened as they slowly moved to Grief of Dawn. He spread his hands helplessly. “I would like you to know that I really did love her,” the prince said quietly. “I was pinned into a corner, and I had to make a difficult decision.”
“It was a decision you made long ago when you first decided to sell your soul for gifts from a stone,” Master Li said matter-of-factly. “Grief of Dawn made exactly the opposite decision—incidentally, Moon Boy, could you bring the soul-sound from this one piece?”
He picked up the piece of stone he had taken from the Laughing Prince and tossed it to Moon Boy, who shook his head and said, “No, not from a flat piece. I'd need two of them.” From the tone of Moon Boy's voice, I assumed he had decided this was all a bad dream.
Master Li nodded. He got to his feet and walked over to the body of Grief of Dawn and pulled out his knife. Her life had drained away down in the tomb, and there was only a trickle of blood when he removed the ugly wooden shaft from her chest. He probed the wound and washed something in wine and dried it on his tunic. When he tossed it to Moon Boy, I saw that it was a small sharp sliver of stone.
“I was wrong about Grief of Dawn,” Master Li said. “I thought she had been Tou Wan's maid in a previous incarnation. The truth is that she never left that incarnation. Tou Wan stabbed her with the hairpin. The tip broke off inside her heart and kept her alive, and she fled and was hit on the head by soldiers who left her for dead. Again the stone brought her back to life, and the maid wandered into the world without a memory. A cruel and dangerous world for a pretty girl, and she was bleeding and unconscious when old Tai-tai took her in and gave her a home and a new name.”
Master Li squeezed Moon Boy's shoulder, and walked back and squeezed mine and sat down beside his wine flask.
“Do not mourn Grief of Dawn,” he said quietly. “Remember how she sang in her delirium when she thought she would ease the pain of an old lady she loved? Inside her heart she carried a gift from Heaven that was not rightfully hers. She could have become the most honored and celebrated woman in history, but she would not be party to stealing. I have no idea what her strange wandering life was like, nor how and why she moved from one existence to another without awakening her memory, but I do know that for seven and a half centuries she refused to steal from Heaven, and she is being greeted with the highest honors in Hell where her credit account could buy half the kingdom, and surely she will be allowed to ascend to K'un-lun and sit at the feet of the August Personage of Jade. Which is a good deal more than Prince Liu Pao will be able to do.”
His eyes were cold and contemptuous as they moved across the gorge to the prince.
“He's already killed five people in order to dip his brush into the well of the stone and steal the touch of Heaven, and then paint pretty pictures and pass them off as his own.” Master Li rinsed his mouth with wine and spat it out. “Fraud and forgery,” he growled. “Paint slapped over dry rot and gilded with lies.”
The prince turned white.
“Is that what you think, old man?” he whispered. “Is that what you really think?” Now he was turning red. “My paintings are private! I do not show them! What sort of fraud is that?”
“Masturbation,” Master Li said. “In your circumstances, that still qualifies as rape.”
“My paintings are for the purpose of learning the paths of universal energy!” the prince shouted furiously. “My loathsome ancestor sought truth in rivers of blood; I seek it in harmless paint, and even the Laughing Prince could claim that his was the proper goal of philosophy! You, on the other hand, waste your time with unimportant puzzles, which is the occupation of a child!”
Master Li raised his flask and drank deeply, and wiped his lips with his beard.
“Oh, I wouldn't call the puzzle of the stone unimportant,” he said mildly. “I will, however, plead guilty to holding a certain childlike view of the universe.”
The prince's color was returning to normal. He raised the purse and drank, and leaned back comfortably.
“Childlike? No, but very old-fashioned,” he said with a chuckle. “In fact, everything you do is old-fashioned. Who in this day and age would charge all over China, even to the pits of Hell, trusting to the immediacy of experience rather than the trained objectivity of an army of investigators? You appear to take seriously the anthropomorphic folk concepts of gods and goddesses, and your concern for the stone appears to spring from a literal acceptance of fairy tales from the spurious Annals of Heaven and Earth. Li Kao, you are a very great man, but—and I say this with the greatest respect—an antique memorial to long dead concepts and practices and values.”
The prince was laughing as he lifted his stone. I realized that it was attached to a cord around his neck, and the silver cup for his painting brush that had encased and concealed it was slipped down. Master Li leaned over and whispered to me, and I surreptitiously whispered to Moon Boy.
“He says you're to prepare to bring the soul-sound from the stone. He'll yell when he wants it.”
Moon Boy's eyes were glazed and he tried to focus them. His fingers trembled as he lifted the two pieces in his cupped hands.
“Still, there are certain pleasures denied to an antique with a slight flaw in his character,” the prince said. “Such as being able to hear the simple sound of total innocence. To be fair, half the villagers and monks couldn't hear the stone either. I would think, however, that at this distance, and with the acoustic effect of the cliffs behind us—”
“Now!” Master Li yelled.
Moon Boy's lips moved to his cupped hands. His throat vibrated rapidly, and my heart leaped as indescribable beauty and yearning and hope and sadness bounced back and forth between the cliffs.
Kung… shang… chueeeeeeeeeeh…
Master Li reeled, but his reaction was as nothing compared to the stone of Prince Liu Pao. It tore loose from the prince's hands and literally flew toward Moon Boy, and the cord jerked tight around the prince's neck and pulled him forward.
I am so stupid that it wasn't until then that I realized what the prince had been planning to do to us. The gorge was only a few feet away, two hundred feet straight down to jagged rocks. Prince Liu Pao teetered at the edge, waving his arms for balance, and then he fell. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I was looking at a miracle.
The prince was standing upon thin air. He walked across nothingness, intent only upon hauling the stone back and regaining control of it. Then he looked at us and smiled.
“Really, Li Kao, didn't you think I would expect that?” he said mockingly. “And didn't you think I would learn something from the stone and my ancestor's charts and formulas? I hate to brag, but I rather suspect I know more about the energy forces of the universe than any other man alive.”
He pointed to his sandals, resting upon a void.
“That, for example, is a path of energy strong enough to support ten elephants, if the elephants could learn to see and adjust to it. I have, and I sincerely hope you are similarly capable.”
“One of us is,” Master Li said calmly.
“You mean Number Ten Ox?” the prince said. “I agree that no man alive could climb down one side of the gorge and back up the other without the proper gear, and when Ox carried you from one peak to the other, he was crossing as I am now, upon a path of energy.”
Master Li hopped up on my back, and the prince's smile grew wider.
“That's why in Hell you imagined him to show in the mirror that he was a firstborn, since walking on air can only result from absolute awareness or absolute innocence, but has it occurred to you that Ox was blinded by mist? He isn't now, and innocence cannot bear very much awareness.”
His lips touched the rim of the stone in his hands, and the sound that came from the well was so pure and powerful that I heard not suggestive notes but the actual words from the soul of a stone.
“Come… to… meeeeeeeeee!… Come… to… meeeeeeeeee!”
Moon Boy and I were dragged to the edge. I saw no path of energy. All I saw were rocks rising like shark's teeth two hundred feet below, and terror shook me like a rag doll. I had no choice. I must obey the call or die, and my foot reached out into nothingness.
Moon Boy teetered on the edge. His throat was vibrating faster than a throat could, and sweat was pouring down his face, and something extraordinary was happening. He was projecting the sound of the stone, but at the
