Chapter 21

Ning Tuanzi had appeared out of nowhere and caught the long sword coming down.

Before Ning Shu could take it in, Qiao Qu roared, "What little ghost is this, that doesn't know better than to stand in my way? Today I'll scatter you for good."

He pulled the sword back and drove it into Ning Tuanzi's body.

There was a tearing sound, the sound of something going through flesh.

"No!"

Ning Shu screamed, with her eyes wide open.

The sword was in him.

Qiao Qu went to pull it out, but Ning Tuanzi held on to the blade, and black blood was already coming out of his mouth.

"Tuanzi." Ning Shu's voice shook. "Tuanzi."

"I can't hold it much longer. You. Quickly."

The rim of Ning Shu's eyes had gone red and the tears came down. "Tuanzi. My son."

"Sis, look!" Gouwa pulled at her. Ning Shu turned, crying, and the demon-subduing staff had gone from black to gold, so bright she could not look straight at it.

She did not hesitate again. She ran over and put her hand round the staff, and in the instant she had hold of it the staff threw out a gold light that went on for ever.

It was not heavy any more. She lifted it off the stand without any trouble at all.

"The demon-subduing staff." Qiao Qu's eyes went wide and he stared at her, unable to believe it. "It chose you."

He saw how it stood and went for the door, but as he reached it her grandmother appeared and put a sword straight through his chest.

Gouwa put both hands over his mouth and stared. "Grandma's killed somebody."

Her grandmother made a cold sound. "He isn't a person."

A peachwood sword can never hurt a living person. Use it on one and it goes blunt. And this one had gone clean through Qiao Qu's chest.

There was only one reason for that. He was not a man.

"Look! It's changed!" Gouwa shouted. "A rat spirit!"

The Daoist was gone. What hung from her grandmother's peachwood sword was a rat, burned black.

A moment later the rat went to ash and was nothing.

Ning Shu ran to Ning Tuanzi and went to pick him up, and the moment she touched him her hand went straight through, and there was nothing of him to hold.

"I'm all right. I might. I might need to rest for a while."

His hand, going clearer every second, came up and moved gently along Ning Shu's cheek and touched her forehead, and in the middle of it he drew an upright red line.

Her heavenly eye, opened with Ning Tuanzi's blood.

"Mother's eye is open. Now I. I can stay with Mother."

Ning Shu got the black drop out from her neck quickly. Ning Tuanzi's body went clear and then broke into a scatter of light, and all of it gathered into the pendant.

"Rest properly." Ning Shu stroked the smooth face of the drop and put it to her lips and kissed it. "From now on your mother will look after the two of you."

Just then the ghost baby on the bed let out another cackle of laughter, and there was nothing human in it at all. It sounded like an old woman at the end of her life.

"Ningning, use the staff. Put an end to that thing." Her grandmother's voice came from behind her.

Ning Shu took a firm hold of the staff and walked over, and the baby's laughter got wilder, and the sharp eyes of it stayed on her, and then it called her something. "Sister."

"I'm not your sister."

"You and I are the same. Neither of us was wanted. Both of us were thrown away. You were only luckier. You got born and you got to live in this world. And me, I was given up before I was ever born."

"I'm sorry for what happened to you. They'll get what's coming to them."

"I don't believe in what's coming to people." The ghost baby's eyes stayed on her. "Join me instead."

"Join you?"

"I'll give you everything I have. And you take my revenge for me."

Ning Shu stood still for a moment. She did want power.

Then her grandmother's voice came from behind her like a bell. "Ningning, don't let it get into you. Your heavenly eye is open. The strength of a little demon like that is a grain of rice beside the ocean. It isn't worth a thought."

The ghost baby was frightened at last, and its face twisted, and the fear came up in its eyes. "No. Don't kill me. It was so hard to get born again. Don't kill me."

"I told you before. I have nothing against you. But you hurt my son, and for that I won't let any of you go."

Ning Shu's eyes were cold. The staff went up and came down, and with one sharp howl the ghost baby went to ash and was nothing.

---

Ning Shu held her grandmother up and walked her out of the three-storey red house, and over on the edge of the sky there was the first of the morning in it.

There was a point of red between Ning Shu's brows, like a small bright mole, and what was in her face had settled and gone firm.

When Gouwa found out it had not been a dream and all of it had really happened, he shook in his bed for a whole day.

"God above, it was real. If I'd known it was real, who in his right mind would have gone up those stairs with you? It's too much, you not telling me. I treat you like my own sister and you treat me like a distant cousin."

Ning Shu: ???

Ning Shu: …

Neither her grandmother nor Gouwa told anybody about it, and Ning Shu said nothing either. The old woman had been to the police, and the police opened an investigation into the missing child, and nothing came of it. Nothing could have.

Ning Shu turned the teardrop over in her fingers. It was cold to the touch, cold all the way through.

Ning Tuanzi was in there.

She remembered her grandmother saying that the blood of her heart was precious and could save a life.

She wondered whether it could save a ghost.

Ning Shu pulled the dressing off her right forefinger. She had smeared the blood over her mother's face a few days ago and the cut had not healed yet, and she set her teeth and squeezed hard, and there was still blood in it.

One drop went onto the black teardrop and sank straight in, and a soft ring of light came up on the surface of it, and it no longer looked as dead as it had a moment before.

Ning Shu remembered Tuanzi saying that one day, once she was a master worth the name, he and his sister would be able to live in this teardrop and she could carry them about with her.

Which meant the drop was the thing that joined the two worlds and let her reach them.

So blood of hers put on it would get through to Ning Tuanzi.

Ning Shu was not certain of that. But there was nothing to lose, and if she fed the drop the blood of her heart every day, it might bring Ning Tuanzi back the faster.

Her grandmother saw her doing it, and came and sat down beside her and said, "Your heavenly eye is open. One drop of your blood is worth more than a diamond. Feed that little ghost on it every day and what he grows into is going to be…"

There was no imagining it.

Her grandmother did not approve, and she did not stop her either, because she knew she could not.

"Ningning, your grandmother is old, and there's a great deal I haven't the strength for any more. But I want you to know what it is you're doing."

"I know, Grandma." Ning Shu put the bleeding finger in her mouth and sucked it. "Even with that much in him, Tuanzi won't run wild."

"How do you know?"

"I know."

No mother in this world ever doubts her own child. Even so, Ning Shu said, "I can hold him."

Her grandmother sighed and let it go.

---

Her aunt got Gouwa's discharge papers in order and the whole party got ready to leave Jiangcheng. Her uncle made a point of buying plane tickets. Her grandmother had been worn to pieces over those days and he could not stand to put his mother and the children through the long haul back.

On the day they left, the Nings laid on a dinner to see the family off.

On the old woman's instructions, of course.

Since her grandmother foretold that she would go to the hell where they pull the tongue out, the old woman had been in a terrible state, frightened from one day into the next, and over those few days she looked to have aged and worn right down.

She brought in better than a dozen yin-yang masters to work it out for her, and they all hedged and would not say it straight, and from the little they did say the old woman understood that every word of it was true. When she died she would go to that hell.

She drifted through each day in a fright. She did not even have attention to spare for her precious grandson any more. She asked the masters to break it for her, and every one of them said he was not good enough and could not.

In the end she had to go to Ning Shu's grandmother. She put away everything in her manner that had come before, asked her to dinner and begged her to help, for the sake of the families being joined. She did not want to go to that hell.

That dinner was also the first time her grandmother and Ye Furong had seen each other in all this time. Ye Furong looked worn out. The whole business had cost her badly, and the doctors had said that her body had taken so much damage she would never carry a child again. Ye Furong heard it and showed nothing at all. There was no life left in her, as though she had died with the rest of it.

The one comfort was that she had her son. He was called Ning Xiaohu, a name the old woman gave him, in the hope that he would grow up with some fight in him.

The boy had been spoiled past saving by his grandmother and his mother, and there was nothing he would not do. He was two years younger than Gouwa and had no idea how to behave. At the table he picked a chicken leg up in his hand and tore at it and threw the bones about, and if he wanted a dish and did not get it he shouted the place down.

And the old woman let him, and could not do enough for him.

He was the Ning family's only son, after all.

Her grandmother could not find any fondness in herself for this little emperor of a grandson. The child was this small and already lording it over everybody, and there was no telling what sort of monster he would be grown.

Ning Xiaohu, of course, would not own her either. From the moment she came into the private room he did not greet her and did not look at her properly once, and in the middle of the meal he asked his grandmother why he had to eat at the same table as these country people.

This time the old woman cut him off sharply and told him he was not to say such things, and made him greet her grandmother and his sister. Which set Ning Xiaohu off.

He was the one his grandmother loved best in that house, and she had never been hard with him before, and now she was shaming him in front of a few country people.

Ning Xiaohu wept and shouted and threw himself about, and the whole meal turned into a scene.

Her grandmother watched it coldly and said not one word, and did not touch a grain of rice.

When the meal was over and they came out of the restaurant to take a car to the airport, her grandmother said it to the old woman straight. "You want this suffering of yours broken. But I'm not what I was, and I can't help you."

The old woman's face changed. "Then what am I to do? In-law, you have to think of something. I don't want my tongue pulled out."

Her grandmother said, with no expression at all, "There are two ways. The first is to eat well and take your tonics and beg a few more years off the King of Hell, so that the day you go down is put off as long as it can be."

"That's no good. However long it's put off, the day still comes. In-law, what's the second one?"

When it came to the second, her grandmother looked at Ning Shu. "When the Ning estate is divided, my Ningning gets whatever Xiaohu gets. The brother and the sister treated exactly alike, with nothing in it either way."

"Ah." The old woman's face changed again. "That. That's out of the question. It can't be done."

Ning Xiaohu was listening beside her, and though he did not follow what the adults were saying, the part about his country sister having to get whatever he got came through, and he did not like it. He shouted, "Why? Why does she get what I get? Who does she think she is?"

"Is Ningning not your own granddaughter?"

"But she's a girl."

What Ning Shu wanted to say was that she did not care about the Ning estate and had never once thought about it. But she understood her grandmother. Her grandmother was afraid that when she was gone Ning Shu would have nobody in this world, and she wanted her a claim on the Ning family before that day came.

Her grandmother finished, took Ning Shu's hand, and got into the car.

At the moment Ning Shu was about to go through security, the old woman finally made up her mind and said to her, "You can stay. Stay in the city."

She said it the way you hand out charity, as though letting Ning Shu stay in the city were a favour past all measuring.

Ning Shu looked at her steadily and said one word. "No."

"What did you say?" The old woman could not believe it. "I don't think you've understood me. I'm saying you may stay in the city and live in our house."

She had actually said no. What reason could she have for turning this down? Did she really want to go back to the country and live in that broken-down house?

"Grandma, don't let her live in our house. I don't want her in our house. I don't want her." Ning Xiaohu sat down on the floor and made a scene of it.

"Huhu, stop that. Do as Grandma says."

"I won't. I won't. I don't want her in our house."

And while Ning Xiaohu was rolling about on the floor Ning Shu went through security without a backward look, and the old woman panicked and hurried after her. "Don't go. Don't go!"

Ning Shu looked back at her and said, with real disgust, "You listen to me. As long as I live, I will never set foot inside the Ning family's door."

She turned away, and then seemed to think of something, and said, "Mind you, badly as you've done by me, you are still an elder."

The old woman's eyes lit up. "Ningning, I always knew Ningning was a good-hearted child."

Ning Shu smiled coldly. "So when you go down to have your tongue pulled out, I'll be sure to burn you plenty of paper money. You bribe the officer properly and get him to put a good edge on the knife. One stroke, nice and quick. You'll hardly feel a thing."

The old woman went white to the lips, and in the moment Ning Shu turned to go she dropped where she stood and fainted.

"Mum! What's happened? Don't frighten me!"

Behind Ning Shu everything went to pieces. She did not look back once. She never wanted to see that family again as long as she lived.