“Incredible waste,” Yen Shih said, pointing at the huge metal base the instruments rested on, glinting dully in the sun. “That’s partially high-grade bronze and partially Dragon’s Sinew, meaning an alloy of a small amount of copper, twice as much antimony, and a great deal of tin. It costs a fortune, relatively speaking, and I need a lot of it to make nearly invisible wires for my puppets. Fortunately, I could keep digging this stuff out for several centuries.”
A long flat rock lay beside the platform, and when Yen Shih lifted it I saw a deep hole, big enough to slide into. He did so, taking the torch he still carried, and when he climbed back up the torch was still below, illuminating a small cave.
“There isn’t space for two, but you may find my Dragon’s Sinew mine rather interesting,” he said cryptically.
Master Li went first, and I heard a sudden sharp exclamation, and then his voice lifted happily. “Yen Shih, everything I have is yours!”
Some minutes later he had me lift him out, and then I squeezed down through the hole myself. The torch was stuck in a crevice, burning brightly, and the first thing I saw was the puppeteer’s “mine.” The workmen had poured Dragon’s Sinew with lavish abandon, leaving large congealed pools of the stuff, and Yen Shih had been very neatly chipping away at the edges. As I followed the glinting path of the metal I saw it run into a shelf of solid rock.
“I’ll be the Stone Monkey!” I yelped, and I heard Master Li laugh up above.
Yen Shih had led us to his private gallery as well as his private mine. “Eight! I’ve found all eight!” Ma Tuan Lin had written before a monster burned a hole in his back, and here carved in stone were the eight hooded shamans of three thousand years ago, and the details had not worn away. They were carrying eight cages precisely like the one concealed beneath Master Li’s pallet.
6
A short time later we were seated on the bronze platform beside the astronomical instruments sipping wine—meaning Yen Shih and Master Li were emptying the latter’s wine flask while I drank plum juice with vinegar from my own flask. The puppeteer appeared to have insides of solid copper. Alcohol didn’t seem to affect him at all, and he was getting on splendidly with Master Li, who was in an expansive mood.
“Yen Shih, my friend, when you come to this island you scarcely announce your presence,” Master Li said. “By any odd chance did you happen to be here two nights ago, about the double hour of the sheep?”
“No, I was sound asleep in my house at the time,” Yen Shih said.
Master Li pointed in the direction of Ma Tuan Lin’s pavilion. “Something peculiar has been going on down there,” he said. “You’ve heard about the vampire ghoul who caused Devil’s Hand to lose his chance for the record? Well, a few hours earlier, around the double hour of the sheep, that ch’ih-mei was unquestionably right where I’m pointing, at one of the pavilions.”
The puppeteer looked where Master Li pointed, and then raised his eyes to the water of North Lake lapping at the bank beside the pavilion, and his eyes continued to lift to the opposite shore and Peking and the Vegetable Market, where the ch’ih-mei had fallen and died. The terrible smallpox craters deprived the puppeteer of normal facial expressions, but his right eyebrow was eloquent as it lifted toward the top of his head.
“But how…”
“Ah! You see it. I thought you would,” Master Li said happily. He turned to me. “Ox, that’s the most important reason for coming back to the island. We’re now absolutely certain that the vampire ghoul was outside Ma Tuan Lin’s pavilion a few hours before it crawled into its coffin on Coal Hill. All right, how did it get from the pavilion to the cemetery?”
“Why, I suppose it just—”
I halted with the sentence half formed. North Lake was between the pavilion and Coal Hill, and could a ch’ih-mei swim? The idea of such a monster rowing sedately across in a boat with a ripped-off head neatly stored between its feet was ludicrous, and I seemed to hear Auntie Hua on the subject of monsters: “Ox, if you can’t get to sunlight, run toward water! The living dead fear it, and will brave it only as a last resort.”
Master Li shared the last of the wine with the puppeteer, and then pitched the goatskin flask to the water below.
“I would assume you have a pick and shovel stored somewhere,” he said to the puppeteer. “Our meeting has been so fortunate that I’d like to prolong it, and if you have nothing more pressing to attend to you might like to help track the path of a vampire ghoul.”
Yen Shih’s eyes could also be expressive, and they were sparkling. “Delighted! If nothing else I can dine on the tale for a month,” he said.
Master Li got on my back and the three of us made good time to the pavilion, pausing only to collect Yen Shih’s pick and shovel from a ditch where he’d concealed them, and soon we were standing close to the spot where flies still swarmed around grass stained with a mandarin’s blood. I thought Master Li was going to have us fan out and search for claw prints, but he had something more specific in mind and he pointed toward the huge pile of dirt the creature had apparently crawled from.
“That’s supposedly dirt dug for a construction project that was canceled,” he said. “Construction on Hortensia Island is rare, and I hadn’t heard of anything scheduled. See if you can find the hole this stuff came from.”
We worked around the great pile, hacking through weeds. Then we circled out farther and farther until we reached the limit at which dirt could reasonably be pitched where it was, but still we found no hole. There remained the possibility that the workmen had been terrible amateurs who tossed dirt so that half of it slid back on top of them, and we dug a series of holes down through the pile itself, but always the shovel scraped against solid earth and dead matted grass.
“Venerable Sir, the dirt didn’t come from here,” I finally said. “It had to be hauled in from some other location.”
“That,” Master Li said complacently, “is precisely what I expected, and it’s a hundred to one that the other location is across the lake near Coal Hill. Vampire ghouls never stray far from their coffins. This one happened to fall into, or was taking a nap in, a pile of dirt near the cemetery, and it was accidentally carried here, and its homing instinct allowed it to find the path the dirt had taken. If a ch’ih-mei can find a path, so can we.”
It didn’t take long now that we knew what we were looking for. Yen Shih swung his pick at thick reeds against the bank of a low cliff nearby and almost spiked himself in the left leg as the pick met no resistance and whipped around. We pushed reeds down and found a large dark hole, and any doubts vanished when we found dribbles of loose dirt and marks of large sleds that had been carrying heavy loads. I raced back to the Yu and returned with torches, and then we started down the tunnel that was headed east, toward the Imperial City and Coal Hill.
The path dipped down and down, and finally leveled off, and I nervously lifted my torch and studied the stone ceiling. This tunnel hadn’t been dug recently. It was old, perhaps as old as the Yu, and I saw black spots on the ceiling that seemed to move like giant spiders, and a slow menacing plop-plop-plop sound announced the dripping of water. We were making our way beneath the surface of the lake now, and I didn’t want to think about things like rockfalls. There was no sound except that which we made.
“Hold up,” Master Li said.
He had turned aside and was waving his torch around an alcove that opened on the north side. It was about thirty feet long and ten feet deep, and the floor was littered with fragments of rock. I saw a huge scar in the stone wall, recently made, and Master Li found traces of ancient chisel marks on some of the smashed fragments.
“It almost looks as though somebody discovered an old frieze and then smashed it to pieces before anybody else could see it,” he said. “Ox, do you remember that rubbing we found in Ma’s pavilion? I wonder if it came from here. After all, dirt was carried through this tunnel and dumped right in his backyard, and I doubt that he knew nothing about it.”
There was nothing else to be seen, so we continued on. I was very nervous. For all I knew the ch’ih-mei had his whole family down here, and our torchlight was announcing the approach of dinner. I clutched the pick like
