Chapter 19

Ning Shu ran to the cabinet and lit the candle again, and this time it caught at once and the flame came up.

Ye Furong's soul, with that fright behind it, went straight back into the body.

"Mummy, I'm going. If the people out there see me I'm finished."

"Darling, thank you."

"No need to thank your own daughter!"

"Wait, your brother…"

Ning Shu had not finished asking when Ning Yuanzi went out like a snuffed match.

In the moving light of the candle the colour came slowly back into Ye Furong's face.

Ning Shu went over and felt the side of her neck. The pulse was very faint, but it was there and beating, and there was breath at her nose.

She was alive.

Just then the door opened, and Ning Shu ran out and found her grandmother sitting against the wall at the side of the corridor, looking terribly weak, with her uncle and aunt and Gouwa round her.

"Grandma, what's happened to you?"

Her grandmother raised her eyes a little and waved a hand with nothing behind it. "I'm all right. How is your mother?"

Ning Shu said quickly, "She has a pulse and she's breathing."

Only then did her grandmother let her breath out, and she sent her uncle for a doctor.

Her aunt said, "Have them look at you as well."

Her grandmother shook her head. "I know my own state. There's nothing much wrong."

The doctor examined Ye Furong from top to bottom and said, astonished, "She's alive. This is a miracle."

Ning Shu knew it was no miracle. Her grandmother had argued her mother's life back out of the hands of the underworld officers.

Her grandmother coughed and said, "Help me to Gouwa's room."

Her aunt asked, "Won't you look in on Furong?"

Her grandmother said, "I don't want to see her."

Ning Shu asked her aunt, "What actually happened out here?"

Her aunt had no idea either and said blankly, "We heard your grandmother talking away to herself, a great deal of it, and then she went down on the floor and was out for a few minutes. It frightened your uncle and me half to death. Then she came round again, and right after that your mother was out of danger."

Ning Shu knew her aunt and the rest of them could not have seen the officers.

She turned and looked at Gouwa. His face was white as paper and his mouth was shaking.

"What's the matter with you now?"

Gouwa shivered and told her, "I just saw lightning hit Grandma."

Ning Shu's heart jumped. She thought back. She had heard several cracks of thunder go off right beside her. That thunder and that lightning, could they have been…

"You saw it?"

Gouwa nodded, shaking and a little thrilled with himself at the same time. "Those two in the black clothes, they were fighting Grandma with their arts, and they threw lightning at her, and nothing happened to her at all, and in the end she drove the pair of them off. God. Grandma is amazing. She's better than the Monkey King."

Ning Shu rubbed his head. "Does your grandmother look all right to you now? Go and sit with her."

Gouwa did as he was told and slipped into the ward, and Ning Shu went in after him. That fight had cost her grandmother badly, and she lay down on the bed and was asleep in no time.

Since the day she arrived she had worried about her daughter and then about the thing in her daughter's belly, and she had not rested properly once. Let her sleep now.

---

That evening Ning Shu called her daughter and asked after Tuanzi, and Ning Yuanzi told her the truth.

"My brother went into Ye Furong's belly and fought the little ghost. She was no match for him. But just as he was about to scatter her for good, a gong went off somewhere, and that gong was a very good thing for driving off ghosts, and the sound of it hurt him."

Ning Shu remembered the one stroke of a gong on her way to her mother's room, the one that had torn her open. Could that single stroke have been what injured Ning Tuanzi?

Who was shooting from cover like this?

"How is your brother now?" Ning Shu asked.

"Mm, not very good. But he isn't in any real danger. He says he doesn't want to worry you, so he won't come out for a while. If Mummy needs anything, just call Yuanzi."

Ning Shu said, "Hiding how badly he's hurt only worries me more."

Yuanzi said, "Don't worry. My brother's very far along. And that little ghost is in no better state. He half killed her, and she'll need ten days or a fortnight to come back from it. While that lasts I could take her life without even trying. Don't worry, Mum. The two of us will help you."

Ning Shu's brows drew in. If there was somebody still hiding behind all this, then Ning Yuanzi going after that little ghost could be very dangerous indeed.

She said at once, and seriously, "Listen to me. Neither of you is to have anything more to do with this. Stay out of sight and don't come out at all. Do you understand?"

Ning Yuanzi always did as she was told, and seeing Ning Shu so grave about it she nodded and agreed.

---

That night there was no wind and no moon.

Ning Shu went downstairs on her own, to the nursery in the maternity wing. There were twenty or thirty small cots in there with newborn babies in them.

The lights in the room were down low, and the only light was the soft, faint glow in each cot.

Ning Shu went to one of them. The boy inside was sleeping peacefully. She stood over him and looked down at him coldly.

A demon, and already made.

The instant she put her hand towards it, its eyes opened, and there was a hard light in the black of them.

In the moment it looked at her, Ning Shu felt a pair of hands she could not see close round her heart, and she could not breathe.

And then the baby's mouth went sideways, and it smiled at her, and its face was hideous.

At the same moment every baby in the room began to cry at once, and this one alone broke into a long cackling laugh.

Ning Shu looked at it coldly and said, "I know you have your grievance. So do I. We were both born into the wrong life and got the wrong mother. But I was the lucky one. At least I got out alive. You were killed in the womb."

As Ning Shu went on in that low voice, the baby's laughter got wilder and more inhuman.

"I don't think you've done anything wrong. Even now, if I were you, I wouldn't swear I'd be any gentler about it. But I'm still going to kill you, because you hurt my son."

Then Ning Shu put her hand round the baby's throat and did not spare it.

Tuanzi had already hurt it badly, and the body was very weak.

But however hard she pressed, she could not kill it, and the harder she pressed the wilder and more frightening its laughter got, and the crying of the other children went up into a wail.

And then something hit her hard on the back of the head, and a salt taste came up into her throat, and she made herself swallow it back down.

She turned, and there was a man in a cleaner's uniform.

Ning Shu saw the gong in his hand, old and plain in its shape, and she remembered the gong she had heard that day, and the cleaner she had run into straight after it, who had been so unpleasant, and had said something about there being no need to hurry even if you were on your way to be born again.

It had been him all along. He had been inside the hospital the whole time, waiting for the child to be born.

"Give me the ghost baby." His voice was low. "And I'll let you live."

"So you're the Daoist my mother and father hired. All of this has been you."

"Your father and mother did the wicked thing, not me. All I did was go with the current. I eat this ghost baby and my heavenly eye opens, and it does a great deal for what I am. Your mother is safe and well. We each get what we want and neither of us owes the other anything."

"And looking at the yellow light over your head, you'll come to a great deal in time. I'm Qiao Qu, and I'd be glad to be a friend to you across the years. All you have to do today is not stand in the way of my getting the Way, and I'll pay you back for it later."

Then he came towards her, and Ning Shu caught up the baby and backed two steps away.

She could not give it to him. Her grandmother had said a ghost baby in the world would set a whole region on fire, and this man wanted to eat it.

Ning Shu was not handing the child over whatever happened.

"So the girl won't drink when it's offered politely." Qiao Qu took up the gong and struck it several times running, and the sound of it felt as though it would open Ning Shu's head.

She clapped her hands over her ears in pain and went down into a crouch, and the baby came out of her arms and onto the floor. The Daoist picked it up and turned to go, and Ning Shu went after him.

She was not clear in the head any more. Everything had gone muddy, the way it does in a dream. She wanted to shout and could not get the shout out. Her eyes would hardly open and everything she looked at was blurred, and the Daoist's back got further and further away and went out of sight at the end of the corridor.

Ning Shu could not even tell whether the shapes moving around her were people or ghosts.

Pictures of the end of her first life went through her head. She was running. She ran and ran, and at the last she went down the stairs and the back of her head took the blow that killed her, and she died in Lu Zheng's arms.

The sky was all dark and low and there was no air in it.

Was she walking a road of the living or a road of the dead?

Ning Shu stumbled on after him, and her legs went from under her, and she walked straight into somebody.

A smell she knew came at her, and the man caught her quickly. The last thing Ning Shu saw before her eyes closed was Lu Zheng's face with the frown on it. She put her hand up without meaning to, wanting to touch his jaw, and before she reached it the hand fell back, with nothing left in it.

"Lu Zheng. Lu Zheng."

"I…"

Ning Shu went right under.

---

There was no telling how long it was. Ning Shu opened her eyes and her grandmother and her uncle were looking down at her, worried. "Ningning, are you all right?"

Ning Shu frowned slightly. "I'm all right. Grandma, what happened?"

Before her grandmother could answer, her uncle said, "The baby's been stolen."

"I know." Ning Shu had watched the Daoist called Qiao Qu take the child with her own eyes.

"How are the Nings taking it?" Ning Shu asked.

"They pulled the security footage. For some reason every camera in the nursery was out, so all they got was the corridor, and that only caught him from behind, with no face. They've been to the police. Your grandmother fainted on the spot when she heard."

Ning Shu said, "I can imagine."

Her grandmother asked quickly, "Was it the man who took the baby who hurt you?"

Ning Shu told her everything that had happened in the nursery.

"From what he said, he meant to eat the ghost baby and open his heavenly eye that way. Grandma, can it be done like that?"

Her grandmother made a cold sound. "The heavenly eye is heaven's to give. If you haven't got it, you haven't got it. Go on refusing to see that and come at it by the back door, and nothing good comes of it."

So after her father brought him in to take the little ghost away, the Daoist called Qiao Qu must have started working it out. He had her parents' hunger for a son and the little ghost's resentment to use, and he had worked on her until she was something vicious, and when her mother was pregnant again he put the thing into her, and it grew into a ghost baby, and he would eat it and open his eye.

Years of that much planning. It showed what opening the heavenly eye meant to a yin-yang master, and how little chance anyone had of it.

"So what do we do now, Grandma?"

"Ningning, do you remember his name and what he looks like?"

"I do. He's called Qiao Qu, about one metre seventy-two, a black mole at the corner of his mouth, a hooked nose, thick lips." Ning Shu went through the Daoist's face in every detail.

Her grandmother nodded and took a thin wad of little white paper men out of her bag, and scattered them over the floor one by one, and said a charm over them under her breath.

Burn money till it melts the rivers and the sea, let the fine light come out and open up the sky. Soul-taking masters, come down the golden stair, gods and generals, come down out of the cloud.

The scattered paper men came alive. They stretched themselves lazily, and then every one of them knelt in front of her grandmother, and her grandmother said, "I want you to find a man. The moment you find him, come and tell me."

She described Qiao Qu's face again, and the paper men took their orders and scattered every way, out of the window and out of the door.

Gouwa came back from the lavatory and trod flat on one of them on his way in.

"What's this?" He crouched to pick it up, and the paper man got back on its feet and shot off past his foot.

"Mother of God!" Gouwa bolted into the room and dived into his mother's arms. "The paper's come alive!"

Her grandmother explained. "That's called scattering paper to make soldiers. They'll find that crooked Daoist for me faster than anything else could."

Ning Shu's mouth came open. "That's wonderful."

"Wonderful nothing. These are small tricks and beneath notice."

"That's beneath notice?" Ning Shu could hardly believe it. "Then what counts as a real one?"

Never mind, Ning Shu thought. She would never get where her grandmother was. The woman carried all of that and had sat in a village for years with her mind as still as water, and wanted none of the money. Ning Shu could not learn that. What she wanted was to earn more, to stand on her own feet in this world and live a little better.

---

Her grandmother would not be persuaded to go and see her daughter.

Ning Shu wandered down to the maternity ward to look in on her mother, so that she could go back and tell her grandmother how she was. Her grandmother could not bring herself to go, so her granddaughter would do it for her.

Before Ning Shu reached the room she met the old woman coming the other way.

The sight of Ning Shu was more than the old woman could bear. She blamed her precious grandson's disappearance entirely on her.

"You tell me what you were doing in that nursery the other night."

"Nothing. Looking."

"As if you ever meant any good. You wanted my grandson dead from the start, and now somebody's carried him off, and you were in it with them. I've been to the police. I'll have your whole family in prison."

Ning Shu did not want anything to do with her and went round her and straight on. The old woman saw she was being ignored and the rage went up another floor, and she came after her with the stick up to hit her.

And then somebody caught the stick. Ning Shu turned, and her grandmother had come from somewhere and put herself in front of her with her hand tight on the stick, and the old woman pulled at it and could not get it free.

"What. What do you think you're doing?"

Her grandmother's face was hard. She looked at the old woman and said, "In-law, I have a piece of advice for you. Anybody else asking for it would have to pay me for it. You can have it free."

"What. What advice."

"I advise you to watch what comes out of your mouth, and to keep it shut about what you don't know. With the lies and the spite you've talked, and all the talking about people behind their backs, when you die you'll go to the hell where they pull the tongue out. The officers down there will go through every foul thing you said in your life. A hundred of them and they pull your tongue a hundred times. A thousand of them and they pull it a thousand times."

"Ah!" The old woman backed away, white to the lips. "You. You're making that up."

Her grandmother made a cold sound. "Ask about me. Hu Ying has gone about this trade with an iron mouth and a straight word and has never once said a thing that wasn't so. If you don't believe me, hire a fortune-teller of your own. One reading will tell you."

The old woman was so frightened that she went down on the floor, like a woman with a stroke, and the whole heavy body of her shook. "I don't believe it. I don't. I don't believe it."

"All I'm telling you is to do a little good with your mouth, so there's less of it to suffer later." Her grandmother swung her sleeve, took Ning Shu's hand and turned away.

Ning Shu looked back at the old woman. There had been no end to the bullying in the last life. Seeing her broken down like that, and hearing what her grandmother said was waiting for her in the underworld, Ning Shu enjoyed herself very much.

---

In the afternoon Gouwa came to fetch Ning Shu downstairs to see the fuss, something about the police coming round to take statements. The two of them ran down, and as they came round the turn of the stairs Ning Shu stopped where she was.

There was somebody standing at the head of the stairs with his back to her, in a well-cut black shirt, looking out of the window and thinking about something.

The one person in this world who could set her heart going like that.

Lu Zheng.

She half remembered seeing him while she was out.

So it had not been a dream.

Lu Zheng had his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the window, as though something were on his mind.

He was young, and the look of him was past arguing with, so finely made that anybody would want to go up and be near him, and that manner of his that kept the world at arm's length made nobody dare.

Set beside him, Gouwa, who was a good-looking boy in his own right, could not be looked at. One of them was a round clear piece of amber and the other was the dung beetle stuck inside it.

Ning Shu sent Gouwa on down to see the fuss and said she would come in a minute.

Once Gouwa had gone, Lu Zheng turned round and gave Ning Shu a flat look.

He really could put it on.

He had been doing it since he was this high. When she was with him in the last life she had given him the name "the World's Number One Show-Off," and he had earned it.

Though if anybody else had called him that there was no counting how many times they would have died for it. It was only Ning Shu, whom Lu Zheng spoiled past all reason, who dared.

"What are you doing here?" Ning Shu went over and asked.

"Someone in the family is ill. I came to see them." Lu Zheng answered easily. "You?"

"Same as you."

"Why did you faint yesterday?"

Ning Shu thought about it and said, "Not enough to eat, probably. We country children often go hungry."

She had meant it as a joke and nothing more, but Lu Zheng nodded, and there was even a trace of pity in his eyes.

Ning Shu could not keep it going.

Then Lu Zheng laughed, and the laugh told her at once that he had been having her on.

This boy.

And she had never seen a smile like that on him, clean and bright. The Lu Zheng of the last life always had something wicked and dark pulling at the corner of his eye when he laughed. The two were nothing like each other.

A great deal of Ning Shu's guard against him, and her fear of him, went out of her.

She walked over and stood next to him, and even wanted to reach out and pinch that pale cheek and tease him.

"I keep feeling…" Lu Zheng had just started when Ning Shu's paw arrived and poked him in the face.

His eyes went down to her hand and he had no expression at all. "What are you doing."

"Er." Ning Shu pulled the hand back, embarrassed. "You've got good skin."

"…"

An awkward silence, and Lu Zheng broke it first. "I keep feeling as though I know you well. But I've never met you before."

"Definitely never," Ning Shu said. "We're strangers."

"And yet you seem to understand me very well."

She had been tangled up with him for two solid years. Of course she understood him.

"Don't think so much about it, kid. We're not that close." Ning Shu said it as though it were a joke. "We've never met before and we won't meet again, and there's no need for either of us to know the other's name."

"Your name is Ning Shu."

"…"

Lu Zheng smiled. "I had you looked into."

"Shit."

Ning Shu thought she would change her name the moment she got home. She was not having him fastened on to her again.

"If we don't know each other, why did you say what you said yesterday when you fainted?" Lu Zheng looked at her, and something hard to read came up in those deep eyes.

"What did I say?" Ning Shu had no idea. She could not remember a word of it.

"You said… never mind."

"Oh, stopping halfway is a horrible thing to do." Ning Shu was genuinely worried now about what she might have let out, and she made him finish.

Lu Zheng smiled a little. "You said my name. Twice."

"…"