Blood Magic

NINETEEN

The city of Luan; Shanxi Province, China; nineteenth day of the eleventh month of the forty-fourth year of the Ching Dynasty

FOUR people waited outside the home of Chen Wu Yin, the man who held the license for collecting night soil in the district where the sorcerer had taken up residence—two hungry, desperate women, a middle-aged man, and Li Lei.

She had planned to arrive after the women, who came every day. She had not planned on the man.

He had long hairs growing out of his nose. Li Lei regarded those hairs with disgust. How had he heard that the collector would have a job available today? After all Li Lei had gone through to make that possible, it was patently unfair for the man to be here.

She’d needed to find a young employee, one without a family of his own who would be left behind to starve. Whatever bribe or blackmail the sorcerer had used to procure his place, it had been effective. The sorcerer controlled the city and its gates. It was not too difficult to slip a single person through the gate, but smuggling out an entire family without the proper papers would have been impossible.

Then she’d had to persuade the young servant man to leave. She had plenty of coin, which is a fine persuader, but by then she hadn’t been able to speak to him . . . or to anyone. In the end, she’d had to use one of the three stones Sam had given her as part of her training.

If he thought she was foolish to have used his gift on such a paltry target when she could simply have killed him, well, he could laugh at her later. If she had a later. If not, he might still laugh. But she hoped he would also burn things. A great many things.

Oh, she had considered killing the man. She was not squeamish, whatever Sam said. She could have told herself that the man died in service to the city or even the whole of China. Sam believed the sorcerer would not be satisfied with a single city, that his power would only grow . . . as would that of his leman, whose hunger was never sated. Eventually the sorcerer might turn his eyes on that shiniest of baubles, the emperor’s court.

He could do great damage there. His lover could do even more.

But Li Lei was not here to save China, the emperor, or even the city. Nor was she here to further Sam’s plans and manipulations. Her eyes had been open from the first. He had said he would have a use for her, and had bound her to fulfill it when the time came.

She called him Sam. That was a little joke between them, born of a punning game he enjoyed. To others he was Sun Mzao, much-storied and seldom seen. According to the peasants, he had lived in the mountains near Luan for one thousand years. According to the scholars, he had been killed many years ago at the Battle of Shanhaiguan, where he had fought against the Mongol invaders.

Sometimes the scholars were silly and the peasants wise.

Sun Mzao had known that the sorcerer and the Chimei would come long before they did. He had first called to Li Lei when she was fifteen, knowing she would one day run to him—and that she was the tool he would need to act against the Chimei when the time came. He had told her none of this until he considered the time right.

But he had not known Li Lei’s family would be killed. She did not blame him for it. He was what he was.

Still, she was not here for him, or because of the word she’d given him when he took her as apprentice. She was here because the sorcerer and his lover had taken those who were hers.

“Lad, you might as well look elsewhere,” said the man with the hairs in his nose. “You know I’ll be chosen instead of you or those two poor women.”

He was right, but Li Lei did not wish to agree. She ducked her head to hide her scowl—she had difficulty at times appearing properly subservient—and shook it in a firm negative.

“You were told to come here, eh? I guess you can’t disobey, but you waste your time.”

Li Lei wondered why a healthy man of thirty or so would seek a job hauling feces. He wasn’t starving or coughing or marked by the pox, but there must be something wrong with him. Well, he did not wear the queue, which was stupid, but there were still those who resisted the Manchu emperor’s edict for his Han subjects. Personally, Li Lei found it convenient. With her head partially shaved and the rest of her hair drawn back in a braid, people looked at her and saw a boy of fourteen or so. It never occurred to them she might be female.

The man shrugged and turned away. “Don’t be sensible, then.”

Perhaps she was not the only one who’d thought that working such a lowly job might gain her entry into the sorcerer’s residence. It was a disconcerting thought. He might be a thief.

Was he with a tong? Surely he would have threatened her, if so . . . but no, he thought she was no threat to his getting the job. How would she get rid of him? She did not want to kill the man, even if he did have disgusting nose hairs.

The battered door of Chen Wu Yin’s house opened. His wife stood there, eyeing the four of them. Chen Wu Yin’s wife was very fat, very shrewd, but Li Lei had learned that she was prone to stealthy acts of kindness.

“So, you want a job, eh?” She studied the peasant man out of eyes reduced to new-moon slits by the greater moons of her cheeks. “Oh, quiet, quiet,” she told the two women, who had begun bleating of their need for a job. “You know I do not send women with Wu Yin. My honorable husband has no sense with women. I do not know why you still come.”

Li Lei knew why they came. Chen Wu Yin was a lecherous old goat, which was why his wife would not hire women. But when others were not around to take note, she often found an errand for these two women, and paid them with a bowl of rice. Li Lei thought she was wise not to let her kindness be known. Too many would show up at her door, looking for handouts or small jobs. She couldn’t feed all the city’s poor.

As for how Li Lei knew of it—why, it was winter, and Li Lei had learned much as apprentice to Sun Mzao. Chen Wu Yin’s wife liked to be warm. She kept a small fire burning most of the time; Li Lei had listened through the fire. It was a use of magic, yes, and so a risk, but the sorcerer could not purge the city entirely of magic. Fire-listening took very little power for one of the fire-kin like her, and could easily be mistaken for some charm the woman had bought, if it were noticed at all.

“Mistress,” the peasant man said, his voice soft, his gaze appropriately downcast, “I have hopes you might have a job for me. I am a good worker—strong and healthy—and I have a wife and two small sons. I need to work.”

“Hmm.”

Li Lei had a sudden inspiration. From behind the man’s back, she pointed at him and made the sign for tong. The woman might not recognize it, but if she did—

“You look strong enough,” she said grudgingly, “but I have promised to speak with my cousin’s wife’s sister’s son today and see if he can do the work. It is a matter of family, you understand? If he does not work hard, I will speak with you again.” For the first time she looked directly at Li Lei. “Well, boy? Are you going to keep me waiting forever? Come in, come in.”

The house where the night soil collector lived with his wife was nowhere near as fine as the house where Li Lei had lived, of course. The small public room she entered was crowded and none too clean. But a fire burned cheerily in the hearth on the far wall. Its warmth was welcome.

“So the man was part of the tong, was he?” Chen Wu Yin’s wife demanded.

Li Lei hesitated, then shrugged, tapped her head, and nodded. I think so.

“What, are you mute?”

Li Lei opened her mouth and showed the fat woman why she did not speak. She then dug out the soiled and much-folded piece of paper she’d prepared, which described her supposed antecedents. For who would hire a mute boy who had no people to speak for him?

A surreptitiously softhearted woman who lived off the collection of shit, it seemed. For the woman could not read, that was clear, yet she exclaimed at the sight of Li Lei’s mouth, then muttered about fools and folly—it was not her husband who required mute servants, no, and why were people such idiots? And while she muttered, she retrieved for Li Lei a small bowl of bean curd, then lectured her about where she would sleep and how hard she would work.

To her disgust, Li Lei felt her eyes fill. She ate the bean curd and bowed her thanks, and her silly eyes stayed moist. At that moment she knew what she would do with the coin sewed into a sash beneath her clothes. It could stay here, with this woman who’d helped a dirty, mute young boy when she did not have to. She wouldn’t be needing it herself, would she?

After that she did indeed work very hard, and when she curled up in the straw in the little shed where she’d been told to sleep, her muscles ached and she could hardly stand to smell herself. But she knew now that the first part of her plan would work.

The one flaw with Li Lei’s disguise had been her voice. Try as she might, she could not sound like anything other than a young woman. So it was necessary that she not speak—and there was a good way to explain that. The night soil collector did not require mute servants, but the sorcerer did. A few impoverished but enterprising families had, early on, tried to place their surplus sons or daughters in his service by rendering them unable to speak. Chen’s wife assumed Li Lei was one of them.

For now, Li Lei would collect night soil—which meant entering the grounds of the sorcerer’s compound. Once she understood something of the workings of the place, she could change her disguise slightly. She did not need to pass for a servant there for long, after all.

Li Lei lay awake in the darkness, curled in the smelly straw, for a long time. She pined for sleep like a lover, but it would not come.

Just as the ghosts had not come. Not last night, or the night before, or the night before that. Or else they had, but Li Lei had been unable to see or hear them.

Her silly, fecund stepmother was dead. Her aunts were dead—her mother’s younger sister, her father’s older sister, and their aunt. So were the servants, even harmless little Shosu who used to giggle with Li Lei when she was supposed to be working, and fussy old Zi Jeng, who had worked for her father’s father.

Her father was dead. The babies . . . and oh, would not Jing be incensed that she thought of him as one of the babies? But he would not know, for he and the little girls were dead. She would never see or speak to any of them again. She did not even know where their bodies lay, to take them offerings.

Sun Mzao claimed such offerings could not reach them in the land of the dead, but while he knew a great deal about death, he admitted he had no contact with the dead. Neither did Li Lei. Her knowledge of death lay entirely on this side of the curtain . . . but aside from that limitation, it was abundant.

The Chimei had killed her entire family, using one of her loved one’s hands to deal the deaths. The demon could not herself be killed, much as Li Lei longed to send her across that dark curtain . . . but she could be hurt, diminished, stopped.

And the sorcerer could be killed.

He would be. Li Lei had vowed that on her true name—just before she’d cut off her tongue.