The Halloween Collection Read Free Page A

clothes, was enough to
identify the man from Tsheh to the old villagers. They knew what he
was, and they gave polite bows.
    Yu Pao ignored them for now as he marched
down the path to the front door, and inside. The place was small,
having only two rooms, and the door allowed in just enough light to
hint at a clean kitchen of modest furnishings, countertops and an
old plank table. The second room was separated by a painted screen
before the doorway, and the smell made Yu Pao jerk his head even as
he entered.
    The back shutters were open, allowing in
light and more than a few fat, black flies from the swamp below.
The room was a sleeping chamber with mats on the floor, and
Jing-Sheng was sprawled across the larger of the two. Yu Pao knew
him mostly by the intricate tattoos from his left wrist to elbow:
Images of choppy waves, a sea dragon, square coins with hollow
centers. Jing-Sheng’s face was mauled, the blood already congealed
in his long hair on the floor around his head like a dark corona.
His abdomen was dug out like a half-made canoe, and the flies
trundled busily about on exposed entrails.
    Yu Pao looked down at his old friend and
Clan brother only briefly before spreading a blanket over the
remains. Flies trapped under it buzzed angrily. He turned away and
marched back outside.
    The boy with the horses and the village
elders had found somewhere else to be. One man waited in the
packed-dirt street, leaning on a staff. His face was so wizened it
seemed to be shriveling into itself beneath a sparse beard of long
gray and black hairs intermixed. The shapeless old robes draping
him may have started as white long ago, but they were now a grimy
yellow. One eye was milky and sightless, the other was sharp and
steel gray. It was that one he focused on Yu Pao before bowing.
    “Gentleman of the city,” the old man
said.
    Yu Pao had no interest in pleasantries.
“What happened here?” he demanded, hands in fists at his sides.
Besides his tetsubo, Yu Pao wore a long tantu dagger in a sheath on his
hip. The shorter blade of a throwing uchni-ne rode within his right sleeve.
    The old man straightened as much as he was
able and got quickly to the point.
    “None know for certain. The woman Baojia
awoke and found your friend as you see him now. She has no memory
of anything that happened in the night.”
    “That seems unlikely,” Yu Pao said, voice as
ever polite, but unmistakably hard. “It would not have been
quiet.”
    “No,” the old man agreed. He had plainly
seen Jing-Sheng’s body, the lower ribs snapped and wrenched open.
“Yet what happened in that room may have occurred without the woman
knowing, for she may not have been there. Not as herself.”
    Yu Pao looked more carefully at the old
man’s robes: Voluminous and of a cut that had once been in style,
long ago. The feet poking from beneath the hem were in worn cloth
shoes with pointed toes.
    “You are no sort of mayor of this village,”
Yu Pao said, and the old fellow shook his head once.
    “I am not. My name is Da-An, and for a time
I was court wujen in the Emperor’s service.”
    “A wizard,” Yu Pao said, though without much
enthusiasm. As a native of the cosmopolitan city of Tsheh he was
not burdened by any superstitions regarding the practitioners of
magic. He did, however, know that their craft was often about as
reliable as a wet matchlock pistol. Yu Pao was a man who
appreciated the sureness of a tempered steel blade.
    “So I was,” Da-An said. “And though it has
been many years now since I walked that path, I still know the
shadow left behind by the visit of a dark spirit.” The man’s single
eye focused on Yu Pao’s. “It is something that is easier to show,
than it is to tell.”
     
    * * *
     
    The woman awaited them at a neighboring
house some distance from her own. The mistress of that place was in
her yard with a pack of small children running around her, one of
whom stopped playing and met Yu Pao’s eyes. He was a small boy
whose