“That flag narrows the list of possible victims considerably,” Master Li said happily. “Has there been any word that one of the foremost scholars in the empire has breathed his last? No, there has not, and now I’m beginning to think that my suspicion of conspiracy and cover-up is a certainty.”
When we turned through the outer gates we saw a courtyard crammed with palanquins and carriages and sedan chairs like ours, swathed in mourning cloths. A mob of junior mandarins bowed deeply to Master Li’s cap and badges, for he was wearing the whole works, including symbols of imperial office he hadn’t held in sixty years, and the effect was very impressive. He marched up the steps as though he owned the place, and we entered a reception hall that was huge to the point of being grotesque. Several forests had been depopulated of wild animals to provide furs to cover the walls, along with immense tapestries and various hangings. A carpet that seemed to be made of white ermine stretched across an acre of floor to a marble dais, and upon the dais rested a huge coffin.
Senior mandarins were making their way with stately dignity up the carpet to pay their last respects to their colleague. Then somebody noticed Master Li. A sharp intake of breath caused heads to turn, and it was fascinating to see eyes widen in sequence and one elegant robe after another twitch backward as though avoiding contact with leprosy—almost a dance, and Master Li did his part by greeting each flinching fellow with a toothy smile: “Wang Chien, dear friend! How delightful that these unworthy eyes should once more bask in your divine radiance!” And so on. At first nobody else said a word, but then the silence was broken.
“Kao! By all the gods it’s Li Kao! Now why didn’t I think of calling you in on this mess?”
The man who was painfully working his way toward Master Li with the aid of two canes was dried and shriveled and hunched with arthritis, and older than I could have believed possible. I thought Master Li had reached the limit of a human life span, but this gentleman added a good thirty years to the limit. I noticed that his progress was followed by deep bows, and greeted by Master Li with real pleasure.
“Hello, Chang! How are you these days?” he said warmly.
“How am I? Senile of course,” the shriveled antique said. “A few days ago I had a long conversation with my eldest grandson, and I was wondering how he’d suddenly grown so intelligent when I realized he’s been dead for twenty years and I was talking to the parrot. Who’s the big kid with the muscles and the squashed nose?”
Master Li motioned for me to step forward and bow.
“Allow me to present my former client and current assistant, Number Ten Ox,” he said. “Ox, this is the Resplendent Thearch, Supreme Lord of the Eastern Aurora and Grand Subtlety, Bearer of the Cinnabar Scepter of the Highest Mystery of the Great Mystery—or, if you prefer, the Celestial Master.”
I honestly think the only thing that prevented me from bouncing up and down upon the floor was the fact that my body couldn’t decide whether to topple forward or backward. This was none other than Chang Tao-ling, the highest high priest of Taoism, and the only man in the empire universally acknowledged to be a living saint. In my village he was worshipped both by the abbot of our monastery and by my atheistic Uncle Nung, and it was commonly said that a list of his good deeds would cover four of the five sacred mountains, and here I was standing right in front of him. Somehow I managed a jerky bow without falling on my face.
“Kao, you’re just the man we need, and I’m glad somebody had the brains to think of it,” the Celestial Master said. “It was one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in my life, which means it might have been designed for you.”
The Celestial Master was partially deaf and didn’t realize his voice level was just below a shout. Master Li had to speak loudly to make his words clear, and the effect was quite strange: hundreds of people standing stone-faced and silent in a huge vaulted chamber, listening to two voices bounce between walls until their echoes began playing tag above a coffin.
“You say you saw it?” Master Li asked.
“It happened right before my eyes, and if something that horrible has to happen it’s just as well the victim was somebody like Ma Tuan Lin. Awful ass, you know, and a disgrace to scholarship,” the Celestial Master shouted.
From the sudden gleam in Master Li’s eyes I assumed he shared the Celestial Master’s opinion of the late Ma Tuan Lin, but he tried to be diplomatic.
“Oh, I don’t know. Ma had some good qualities when it came to research. It was only his conclusions that were idiotic.”
“Kao, you’re too damn generous!” the Celestial Master shouted. “He was a donkey from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, and his self-esteem was as bloated as was his body. You should have seen them try to squeeze that hunk of lard into the coffin.”
The saint swiveled painfully on his canes and glared at the rows of tight-lipped mandarins.
“Damn fools!” he yelled. “If you’d given Ma’s corpse an enema you could have buried what remained in a walnut shell!”
He turned back to Master Li.
“All right, this is your kind of thing, not mine. You’re in charge, so tell me what you want and I’ll try to help,” he said simply.
“We’ll start with what you saw, but let’s get out of this mausoleum,” Master Li said happily.
I felt a warm glow as the Celestial Master hobbled toward a side door. What a marvelous stroke of luck! Master Li would have been deader than Ma Tuan Lin if eyes could kill, but all the mandarins could do was glare. We took a corridor to a small office at the end, looking out over a small simple garden. It was a worn and battered sort of room, crowded but comfortable, with mementos from the time of my great-great-great-grandfather, and the Celestial Master gave a groan of relief as he let himself down on a cushioned bench and relaxed his grip on the canes. He went straight to the point.
“It was the night before last, Kao—morning, actually, around the double hour of the sheep. I couldn’t sleep, as usual, and the moon was bright and you know how warm it’s been. I got up and into a robe and grabbed my canes and made it to the dock and my boat. Rowing’s the only exercise I can handle now. I get practice with the canes,” he said, making cane-shuffling gestures that really were like rowing. “I rowed to Hortensia Island, where I have a special dock and path I can manage. I was taking a walk through the woods, admiring the moon and wishing my mind could still create poetry, when I heard the damnedest scream. Then I saw Ma Tuan Lin running toward me.”
The saint tilted his head so he was looking down the sides of his nose at Master Li, and a faint smile tugged at his lips.
“Here comes the senile part, perhaps. I’m not sure, Kao, I’m just not sure. I can only tell you what I saw or thought I saw. To begin with, Ma was being chased by a little wrinkled man older than you, maybe even older than me, but who was running as lightly as a child, making sharp sounds that sounded like ‘Pi-fang! Pi-fang!’ “
“What?” Master Li asked.
The Celestial Master shrugged. “No meaning, just sound. Pi-fang!” Ma was holding something in his hands that looked like a birdcage, an empty one, and he let loose another scream of terror that made a pair of nesting grouse come shooting up through the darkness with their wings going pop-pop-pop! and they flapped right across my face and made me fall backward into some tall weeds, and that’s probably what saved my life. The little old man didn’t see me as he ran past. He waved his right hand and something started to glow in it, bright red, and then he hurled a ball of fire that struck Ma Tuan Lin square in the back.”
Master Li choked and pounded himself on the chest. “A ball of fire?” he asked when he’d recovered.
“I know, I know. The old boy’s finally had the last bit of his brains turn to butter,” the Celestial Master said wryly. “I’m telling you what I thought I saw. Ma was dead before he hit the ground—I didn’t need an autopsy to tell me that—and the little old man ran past him, leaping lightly as a leaf in a wind, and then there was a bright flash that blinded me. When my eyes cleared there wasn’t any little old man. Ma was lying there with that cage thing sticking up through tall grass beside him, and his back was smoking, and I looked every which way. No little old man. Then I heard a high distant ‘Pi-fang!’ and I looked up and saw a great white crane flying away across the face of the moon.”
The saint drew a deep breath and spread his hands wide apart. “Think that was crazy? I haven’t even started.”
“I can hardly wait,” said Master Li.
“Kao, beside the pavilion Ma uses on Hortensia Island there’s a big pile of earth from some kind of construction project that was canceled, and it wasn’t until I saw the pile that I realized I was at the pavilion,” the
