Bridge Of Birds (30 page)

I switched to my second bladder of air and began moving as fast as I could through the
city, and everywhere I saw the same impossible sight. When that bladder ran out I switched
to the third one, and retraced my steps until the rope tied to my belt was leading almost
straight up. Then I jettisoned rocks until I drifted up and broke water a few feet from
the raft.

“Master Li!” I gasped. “Master Li!”

He told me to shut up, and hauled me aboard and rubbed me down. Then he made me drink some
wine before I told my tale. I began with the strange icy current, and the phosphoresence,
and then I said:

“Master Li, in the first house I saw the skeletons of a woman and a baby. That lake must
have taken years to build up behind the rockslide, but the woman had drowned so quickly
that she hadn't had time to grab her baby from the crib!”

Everywhere it had been the same. I had seen gamblers drowned with dice in their hands, and
blacksmiths tumbled over forges, and women whose bones were mingled with the pots that
they had been using to cook dinner.

“Master Li, that city was destroyed in an instant!” I gasped. “If the Duke of Ch'in was
responsible for such a massacre, he must have the coldest heart in the world!”

Li Kao grabbed my arm. “Repeat that,” he ordered.

“Er... if the Duke of Ch'in is responsible, he must have the coldest heart in the world,”
I mumbled.

The expression on Li Kao's face was rather odd, and I decided that he reminded me of a cat
that was creeping up behind a large complacent bird. He waved at the thicket of towers and
spires.

“Ox, this is another labyrinth, and we no longer have the dragon pendant,” he said. “But
do we need it? It occurs to me that when the Old Man of the Mountain told us about the
stupidity of some of his pupils, he may have been slyly saying something about the Duke of
Ch'in.”

Li Kao hurriedly greased his body and grabbed his diving equipment.

“After all, the wisest man in the world could scarcely be pleased with a pupil who chose a
vast city as the hiding place for his heart, buried it beneath hundreds of feet of water,
and then left a path that would lead straight to the rather peculiar nature of the
extracted organ. Ox, lead me to that strange icy current,” purred Master Li.

We drifted down into the eerie greenish glow, and in a minute I found the current. It
nearly froze us to death before we learned that we could follow it from a safe distance by
watching a tiny trail of bubbles. We followed it for hours, through a tangled maze of
streets. I would swim back up to the surface and paddle the raft ahead, and then Master Li
would break water and climb on board, and we would rest and replenish our air bladders. We
were slowly working our way toward the center of the city, and in late afternoon we
paddled the raft toward a copper dome that lifted through the water in the center of four
stone towers. A boulder from the fallen cliff had crashed through the dome, and that trail
of tiny bubbles was oozing up through the hole.

We squeezed through the hole and drifted down toward a pile of treasure that was so huge
that it was ten times larger than the other hoards added together!

Above the loot was a large copy of the duke's tiger mask, hanging upon a stone wall. The
tiger's mouth was wide open, and behind the teeth was a niche where the choicest gems were
piled. I swam closer and saw that the gems were heaped around a golden casket, and my
heart leaped joyfully when I saw that the bubbles were trickling out from the keyhole. My
hand reached out, but Li Kao grabbed it. He nodded urgently at the mask. I noticed that
the tiger's teeth were pointed steel, and I swam to one of the towers and managed to pry a
stone slab from the wall. I swam back and shoved it between the terrible jaws.

The teeth snapped together and began grinding through the stone with a screech that seemed
to be magnified by the water, but the stone held long enough for me to reach through the
gap and grab the casket. I dropped it into a sack that was tied to my waist, just as the
stone dissolved into powder and the teeth snapped shut with a terrible crash. We turned to
swim back to the surface, and my heart nearly stopped beating. Three pearly figures were
drifting toward us in the greenish glow, and if I had not had the breathing tube in my
mouth I would have cried out in pity. They were the three murdered handmaidens of the
Princess of Birds, and their bodies were uncorrupted after all the centuries, and the
horror in their eyes was blended with a strange helpless pleading. They moved through the
water like fish, with small wriggles of their hips and legs, and their long black hair
drifted behind them like clouds.

The hair defied the pressure of the water. It reached out in front of the girls and
floated toward us like masses of snakes. The cold wet coils curled around our breathing
tubes and jerked them from our mouths, and then the tendrils closed around our faces and
clogged our mouths and noses. We turned turtle and dived, and jerked out the second pig
bladders and inserted the breathing tubes in our mouths, and then we flipped over and swam
back up, thrusting at the girls with our bamboo spears. We were wasting our time. The limp
bodies had been lifeless for centuries, and the clouds of hair passed through the spears
and reached out again. The second tubes were ripped from our mouths and air bubbled away
from the bladders. Again we dived, and we inserted the tubes of our last bladders, but
even as I fixed my tube in my mouth I felt heavy coils of writhing wet hair crawl over my
shoulders. Then the last tubes were ripped away. I thrust desperately at the handmaidens,
and I saw that their pleading eyes appeared to be weeping, but their hair lifted to form
an impenetrable cloud. We could not pass.

I grabbed Master Li and swam to the tower and used my spear to pry out another stone slab.
The hole was just big enough, and I shoved Master Li through it and squeezed in after him
and wedged the spear in the gap to delay the handmaidens. I jerked rocks from our belts
and we began to rise. My lungs were bursting, and my eardrums were exploding, and my
eyeballs seared with pain. I was nearly unconscious when our heads broke through the
surface of the water into a small air pocket just below the copper roof. I held Li Kao's
head above water while I gulped air, and I screamed when it touched my tortured lungs.
Finally I could breathe well enough to start thinking again, and I saw that the wall to my
left had nearly crumbled into nothingness. A few kicks knocked a hole in it, and I carried
Li Kao through the hole and climbed up upon the flat roof.

Master Li was an inert weight in my arms. I laid him on his face and began to apply
artificial respiration. I wept when I thought that it was too late, but I soon heard him
cough. I cried out for joy and kept at it while water spurted from his mouth, and finally
he began breathing on his own. Then I fell back on the roof and we lay side by side,
gasping like beached fish. Finally we were able to sit up and look around, and we saw that
we were still in bad trouble. It was more than a mile to the shore, and those handmaidens
were swimming around the tower like sharks. Master Li pounded some water from his ears and
pointed a quivering finger.

“Number Ten Ox, we are witnessing a crime so terrible as to transcend belief,” he said
hoarsely. “The Duke of Ch'in murdered those poor girls, and then he bound them with a
spell that would force them to defend the heart of their murderer. Since he fully intends
to live forever, he has sentenced three innocent girls to eternal damnation.”

He was so angry that he was turning purple.

“Not even the Emperor of Heaven has the right to sentence anyone to eternal damnation!” he
said furiously. “There must be a trial, and the accused must be defended, and the Yama
Kings must concur in the verdict before such a terrible sentence can be imposed!”

I growled and pulled the casket from the sack at my waist. When I held the icy thing to my
ear I heard a faint thump... thump... thump...

“Shall I slice it or squeeze it?” I snarled.

The question was academic. Li Kao went to work with his lockpicks, but he had never
encountered a lock like that one. It was the most complicated pressure lock that he had
ever seen, and nothing but the proper key could open it. A dagger could not scratch the
casket. I smashed it to the stone with all the strength that I had, and I couldn't even
dent it. Friction could not produce the slightest trace of warmth upon the icy surface. I
hurled the casket down and we sat there and stared at it. Apparently when I had grabbed
the casket from the niche I had taken a few jewels as well, and Li Kao slowly reached out
and picked them up: a diamond, a ruby, a pearl, and an emerald. He stared at them
wonderingly.

“Checkmate,” he said softly. “I told you that the August Personage of Jade was going to
tie the two quests into a nice neat knot. There is only one way that we can escape from
this tower, and we are going to have to make a sacred vow.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“To find a raindrop in a thunderstorm, or a petal in a field of flowers, or a grain of
sand concealed among a billion on a beach,” Master Li whispered. “I am a dolt. My poor
brains have turned to butter. Ox, since I can no longer trust what I used to call a mind,
do you happen to remember the names of the handmaidens of the Princess of Birds?”

“Snowgoose,” I said slowly. “Little Ping... and Autumn Moon.”

Li Kao put the jewels into a seashell on his smuggler's belt and had me replace the casket
in the sack and tie it securely to my waist. Then he painfully got to his feet and faced
the poor girls who slowly circled the tower.

“Snowgoose,” he said quietly, “Little Ping, Autumn Moon, listen to me. The quest is almost
at an end. We have the flute and the ball and the bell. I know where to find the three
feathers of the Kings of Birds. I know where to find the golden crown. Now I know where to
find the Princess of Birds. You must let us pass. You must fight as no one has ever fought
before, and let us safely reach the shore.”

I stared at him stupidly. He took a deep breath.

“Handmaidens, if you can defeat the spell and let us pass, I swear by all that is holy,
and in the sacred name of the August Personage of Jade, that the birds will fly!”
Master Li yelled.
“On the seventh day of the seventh moon the birds of China will fly!”

I doubt that I can ever again be decently impressed by courage, because I have been
privileged to witness courage that passes mortal comprehension. Li Kao's voice echoed back
from the spires of the tragic city and faded into silence. Then the bodies of the murdered
girls began to spin in the water. At first I thought that they were out of control, but
then I realized that they were spinning in order to wrap their hair tightly around their
bodies.

I felt a searing wave of pain that nearly knocked me into the water, and while I could not
hear the screams of the handmaidens in my ears, I could hear them in my heart. Master Li
hopped upon my back and I dived into the water and swam toward the distant shore. A
soul-shaking agony surrounded the spinning girls, and scream after scream ripped through
my heart, and the water turned choppy from the jerks of their bodies. I passed so close to
one of them that I could see her tears and see that she was jerking in agony hard enough
to snap her spine. And then I plowed ahead and they faded behind me. The handmaidens did
not give up their terrible fight until I crawled up to safety upon the sandy bank.

We faced the maidens and banged our heads against the ground, but Li Kao did not have time
to honor them properly.

“Ox, we are bound by a sacred vow, and it's time to find out how much strain those muscles
of yours can bear,” he said grimly. “The Castle of the Labyrinth is halfway across China,
but we must reach it by the seventh day of the seventh moon. Can you do it?”

“Master Li, get on my back,” I said.

He climbed up and I turned and faced south, and then I set off at a gallop.

In the late afternoon of the seventh day of the seventh moon we stood upon a sandy beach
and gazed across the water toward a sheer cliff upon which loomed the great hulking mass
of the Castle of the Labyrinth. Sunlight was shining through dark clouds and turning the
Yellow Sea into molten gold, but a high wind was whipping the bay into hard choppy waves,
and seagulls were sailing like snowflakes across a sky that promised rain. I could not
possibly carry Master Li across those waves without killing one or both of us, and I
stared at him with stricken eyes.

“I rather think that help is on the way,” he said calmly, pointing toward a small flotilla
of boats that was rapidly skimming toward us.

The lead boat was a tiny fishing vessel with a bright red sail, and it was being bombarded
by spears and arrows. The wind whipped screams of rage toward our ears. “My purse!... My
jade belt buckle!... Grandmother's life savings!... Powdered bat manure does not cure
arthritis!... My gold earrings!... There wasn't a pea under any of those shells!... Bring
back my false teeth!”

The little boat ran aground practically at our feet, and two gentlemen of low appearance
climbed out and shook their fists at the pursuing fleet.

“How dare you accuse us of fraud!”
screamed Pawnbroker Fang.

“We shall sue!”
howled Ma the Grub.

The howling mob scrambled ashore, and Ma and Fang took to their heels. We climbed into the
little fishing boat and shoved off, and the wind obligingly shifted around and caught the
sail. We raced across the waves while the sunlight was extinguished, and lightning
flickered across the sky, and rain began to fall. The cliff loomed in front of us, and I
steered between jagged rocks and found a place where we could land.

The wind was shrieking around us, and the rain was so heavy that I could barely see as I
swung a rope around my head and sent a grappling hook flying up the side of the cliff. On
the third try I caught a rock that held the hook securely, and Master Li hopped up on my
back and I began to climb. The sheer stone was slippery in the rain, but we had to take
chances if we were to reach the labyrinth before the tide did.