The Halloween Collection Read Free

Long was not much of a horseman. He
was a man of back alleys and twisting lanes, and so had never had
much cause to climb up on an animal’s back. It felt unnatural, but
thankfully the spare horse brought by the village boy proved a
docile beast. The boy led the way on a pony and the horse followed
without Yu Pao having to convince it to do so.
    They passed beneath the great Jade Gate of
Tsheh and out of the port city to the desolate countryside
stretching south. Polished brass cannons on the ramparts behind
them pointed the way, but the guns were only ornamental. No invader
would ever approach the city from the south, for the terrain there
was unsuitable for an army. Centuries ago the lowlands had been
drained, and a wide stone road on arches had been built by some
Duke or Prefect who wished both a monument to his own practicality,
and employment for the people of the city. In time the area around
the sublime bridge had become a fashionable place for the wealthy
of Tsheh to raise funerary monuments to both their ancestral and
newly dead, and a vast network of graveyards and gardens came to
fill the lowlands. It had been a beautiful place of tranquility and
repose, as Yu Pao understood it, but such things never last.
    A generation ago a typhoon off the bay had
breached the coastal berms and dykes, inundating the lowlands and
leaving the grand stone road as a muddy causeway that bisected what
was now a shallow, dismal swamp. Twisting trees and stone memorials
to the long-since dead stretched to the horizon. The taller
monuments jutting above the brackish water were choked with vines
and creepers that seemed to be trying to strangle the stone, with
the patience of eons.
    The place was not pleasant and it had an
evil reputation, so while the causeway still rose above the morass
few people cared to use it after dark. There was heavy traffic even
in the late morning, and the two riders moved around groaning
wagons bound for the great port that acted as a magnet for the
produce of the whole province. The sun was bright but the autumn
day cold, and while the brambly swamp to either side did not look
quite so miserable by daylight, Yu Pao’s mood as he rode in silence
remained dark.
    They were not going far. After only three
miles the ground rose as the area of the flood was behind them. A
cluster of inns and freight yards lined dry ground by the road, but
the boy on the pony led Yu Pao around them and up a modest hill
along a well-worn path. A small village was nestled just beyond the
rise, facing out over the swamps and the obscured monuments. When
the necropolis had enjoyed its time of fashion, this village and
its people had enacted the funerary rites observed there. They were
made to do so well outside of Tsheh’s walls, for the mortuary
profession was among the most Unclean of callings. Though that time
was over and the village of today was little different than any
other around the port, it still retained an old name in the rustic
dialect of the peasants. They called it the Village of Those Who
Touch the Dead.
    The center of the village was made up of old
stone buildings that had once been workshops—of a kind—or
crematoriums. All were now homes. Around them in a circle stretched
ruder hovels, and the boy on his pony led Yu Pao to one on the
northern outskirts, with the swamps immediately below at the back
end of the hill. Yu Pao had never seen the cottage, but he knew it
from Jing-Sheng’s fond description: Humble but scrupulously
maintained with a swept walk and bright red shutters under the
sweeping eaves of old, mismatched tiles. The village was largely
empty with the peasants out in the fields, but a cluster of old men
waited by the front walk, keeping their distance from the dark,
open door.
    The boy dismounted first and held the
horse’s bridle. Yu Pao swung out of the saddle, long hair in a
top-knot swishing across the iron-shod tetsubo club strapped to his back.
The weapon, along with his crisp civilian