Chapter 2

The afternoon sun was warm and mild. Ning Shu sat in the yard shelling peanuts with her grandmother and her aunt.

The country compound she lived in had two houses, one behind the other. Her uncle and aunt and her cousin Gouwazi had the front house. Ning Shu lived in the back one with her grandparents.

Her father's mother, back in the city, was far harder about sons and daughters than her grandmother here, and had not liked Ning Shu from the day she was born. Her grandparents in the country doted on her instead. So Ning Shu's childhood had been a happy one. She ran about after Gouwazi, catching crabs in the daytime and looking at the stars at night, and nothing troubled her.

"That reminds me, Ah-Ning. You were perfectly all right. How did you come to fall off the cliff?"

Her aunt's question broke into her thoughts. "It gave your grandmother a terrible fright. When she heard, her blood pressure nearly put her on the floor."

Only then did Ning Shu think back to it. She had gone over the cliff and very nearly died.

But she had not slipped. Somebody pushed her.

It was Zhou Honghua, the Zhu family's wife from the top of the village. Ning Shu had been picking wood-ear in the woods and had walked straight into Zhou Honghua meeting Li Mazi from the west end of the village behind her husband's back. Zhou Honghua was afraid her husband and the village would find out, so she and Li Mazi put their heads together and pushed the girl who had seen them off the cliff.

In her last life Ning Shu had woken up and told everyone. The whole village turned on Zhou Honghua. But the telling brought disaster down on her own family.

The Li family had money and standing and threw their weight about the village, and were not people you crossed lightly. From the day Ning Shu exposed him, Li Mazi went after her family. He brought men in the middle of the night and burned her uncle's corn field. He saw to it that Gouwazi lost his schooling. Her grandfather took ill over it and ended up in hospital.

She had been given this life back. She was not going to let any of it happen again. She was going to keep her family safe.

"Auntie, it was my own carelessness. I wasn't watching my feet and I went over."

Ning Shu's voice was soft and small, and it made her sound like something easily broken.

It was that voice, soft like that, that had sent Lu Zheng out of his mind in bed more times than she could count.

"You daydreaming child. Always off somewhere in your head when you walk. You nearly lost your life this time. You be careful from now on."

"Yes, Auntie. I'll be careful."

Ning Shu had decided to keep what Zhou Honghua had been doing to herself. She was not going to blurt it out and pull trouble down on the family. She had been reborn, and she meant to walk every step of it steadily and not repeat her mistakes.

"Grandma. I want you to teach me. The bone-reading, the fortune-telling, the feng shui."

Her grandmother put down the peanuts and looked at her, startled. "What's this? You want to learn feng shui?"

Ning Shu nodded, serious. "I want to carry it on after you. Read fortunes, read people's luck, be a feng shui master."

"But Ah-Ning," her aunt said, "didn't you always say it was superstition? Where has this come from all of a sudden?"

Ning Shu had always called her grandmother's trade superstition. She had been ashamed of it, and could not hold her head up about it in front of the other children.

Looking back now, it was only that she had not seen much of the world.

Ning Shu thought for a moment. "I've been as far as dying and come back. It taught me that a thing you haven't seen isn't the same as a thing that isn't real. So I want to learn from Grandma. It will be a skill in my hands, if nothing else."

"It's a hard road." Her grandmother had no wish to see Ning Shu out on the roads telling fortunes for strangers. "You study. Get into a good university and find yourself a good job, and I'll be content."

"Grandma, I really do want this."

"You truly want to learn?"

"Yes. I'm not afraid of hard work."

Her grandmother sighed. "It isn't about hard work. Whether this trade will have you isn't yours to decide."

Ning Shu did not follow, and her grandmother explained. "Some people are born with the sense for it. Their minds are clear and they can reach the gods and the ghosts, and they become great masters whose names everyone knows. Some people are muddy inside. Nothing reaches them, and the trade won't have them."

"Grandma, how do I find out whether it will have me?"

"Come to the Heavenly Master's shrine at midnight. We'll ask him."

---

That evening Ning Shu went out to the shrine in the back yard, which stood with its back to the north and its face to the south.

Her grandmother had told her about the Heavenly Master before. His surname was Huang and his name was Huang Xianci, and he had been a famous adept at the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Qing, a queller of demons and a defender of the Way, renowned in his day. Then the Manchus came through the passes. There were the ten days at Yangzhou and the killing at Jiading, and Huang Xianci would not take up the foreign custom and shave his head and wear the queue, so the bannermen beheaded him.

Except that when they did it in front of the crowd, with tens of thousands of Yangzhou people looking on, the Heavenly Master's head fell and then flew back up and joined itself to his bloody neck again. They went at it over and over. They worked through a dozen executioners and not one of them could take his head off.

In the end they had to let him go. Huang Xianci took a crowd of ordinary people off into the mountains, founded his own school, and was famous for a time.

Ning Shu had always heard this as a story. She had never once taken it for true.

She lifted the curtain and went in. The light inside was dim and there was a faint smell of sandalwood in the air. It was comfortable, and it settled her.

The Heavenly Master's seat stood square in front of her. His face was not a kind one. It was savage, because only a face like that frightens off wicked things. Ning Shu was a little afraid, and her hand went for her grandmother's without her meaning it. Her grandmother said, "The Heavenly Master guards this house. Whether this trade will have you is his to say and nobody else's."

Ning Shu nodded and followed her obediently to the altar. Her grandmother said, "Kneel. Make your kowtow to the Heavenly Master and offer incense, and thank him for saving your life."

Ning Shu knelt on the mat, pressed her head to the floor and offered the incense.

Then her grandmother lit a stick of her own and spoke low.

"Hu Ying, disciple of the four hundred and fifty-second generation under the Heavenly Master's gate, now old in years. My granddaughter Ning Shu wishes to enter the Way. I ask the Heavenly Master whether she may be taken as a disciple of this gate, to serve him with three sticks of incense daily, to quell demons and uphold the Way hereafter, to punish the wicked and raise up the good, and to bring glory to the school."

Her grandmother had not finished speaking when the stick of incense in her hand broke in half. It fell and struck the floor.

Her grandmother went white. She got down at once and knocked her head three times hard against the ground, and asked, frightened, "If your disciple has been wanting in any particular, I beg the Heavenly Master to overlook it."

Ning Shu had heard her grandmother say it before. The smoke from incense rises and drifts all the way to the halls of heaven, and the immortals smell it and know what mortals are asking for.

So it is the smoke that carries.

And now the incense had broken. What did that mean?

It meant the god did not want to hear you.

Ning Shu took up incense of her own and knocked her head three times and said, clear and firm, "I want to learn the feng shui arts from my grandmother. So that nobody pushes me around again, and so I can keep my family from being pushed around. I ask the Heavenly Master to take me as a disciple."

If the first stick breaking had been chance, what happened when Ning Shu stopped speaking was not. The incense in her hand broke too.

And not one stick. Three went at once.

This…

Her grandmother had been at this trade all her life and had never met anything like it.

Ning Shu watched her close her eyes and mutter something under her breath. At last she let out a long sigh and said, "Get up, Ah-Ning."

Ning Shu looked at the savage face of the Heavenly Master, and then at her grandmother, and understood none of it.

It was not until they were out of the room that her grandmother said, "I'm afraid this trade won't have you."

She did not tell Ning Shu why. But that night Ning Shu heard her talking to her grandfather in their room.

"The Heavenly Master says the girl is iron-hearted and has no feeling and no loyalty in her. He says if she enters our gate she will likely not keep to the right road, and she will do harm wherever she goes."

Her grandfather was angry. "Iron-hearted. No feeling. Our Ningning is small, but she is good to us and she knows how to behave. She is nothing like that."

Her grandmother could not make sense of it either. No feeling, no loyalty. She had watched Ningning grow up. The child was good-natured and soft and would never do a wicked thing.

"She's taken it into her head on a whim, most likely," her grandfather said. "If she can't learn it, let her study properly and get herself a decent job later on."

"You're right," her grandmother said. "That's what I think too."

Ning Shu frowned.

Iron-hearted, no feeling and no loyalty. Set against the life she had just finished, the words did her no injustice. She had spent all those years in her parents' house on their charity and under their looks. Her grandparents had died one after the other. Her uncle's family had been ruined by what was done to them. Then the entertainment industry, where everyone pushed her around.

All of it had turned her cold and turned her hard. She did not hand her heart to anyone easily after that. She looked soft, but underneath she was stubborn and she did not break.

Even with Lu Zheng, in the end. However good he was to her, she kept a hand on her own heart and never let herself feel a thing.

Was that what the Heavenly Master meant?

Did he know she had been reborn?

If he knew that, then he ought to know she had her reasons.

Ning Shu turned it over and over and could not get to the bottom of it. But she was not giving up. One way or another she was going to learn this, so she could keep herself safe and keep the people she loved safe.

She went back to her room, lay down and went to sleep. The rest could wait for the morning.

A country night is not quiet. Insects called outside the window every so often.

Ning Shu was just going under, into the muddled country before dreams, when an old timber creaked somewhere in the room. The sound was very clear.

Her eyes came open. Everything in the room was a black shape among black shapes. There was no wind and no moon that night, and the dark lay heavy.

She could just make out that the paper window had come open.

Ning Shu got out of bed, pushed her feet into her slippers, went over and shut it.

Something was not right, and she could not say what. There was no wind at all, and still she felt cold.

She lay down again, turning it over. And then the creak came a second time, just as clear.

The window was open.

Ning Shu finally saw what was wrong. There was no wind. So why did the window keep opening by itself?

Her whole skin crawled.

She felt along the wall, put the light on, walked over in her slippers, shut the window and slid the bolt across.

Now it could not open again.

But once she had put the light out and lain back down to sleep, a violent hammering started at the window.

Slap slap slap slap slap slap, thud thud thud thud.

Ning Shu's soul nearly left her body.

"Who is that! Who's out there!"

The hammering stopped dead. And then a small girl's voice came through the window, thin and far away.

"Mummy. Mummy, open the door. It's me."

The voice was cold. It was very cold, and it was soft and clinging with it, and it made her skin crawl.

Every hair on Ning Shu was standing up when a roar came from outside, full-throated and furious.

"What manner of little ghost is this! Making trouble in the house of Hu Ying!"