Chapter 3

The door banged open and her grandmother came in with a peachwood sword in her hand. She went straight to the bolted window and stuck a talisman across it.

She looked back. "Ah-Ning. Are you all right?"

"I'm all right." Ning Shu got out of bed with a hand on her chest. Her heart was still going hard. "Has it gone?"

"Not a trace of it left." Her grandmother sealed the window with the talisman and put more of them up around the room. Then she came and sat on the edge of the bed to settle her. "That gave Ah-Ning a fright, didn't it. Don't be frightened. Grandma's here."

Ning Shu had the sheet gripped tight in both hands. "Grandma, what was that? I heard it calling for its mother."

Ning Shu nodded. "Grandma, I'm not frightened."

"I'll sleep in here with you tonight. The dead thing won't dare come back and scare you."

Her grandmother was still soothing her like a child.

Which was fair enough. She was twelve.

"Grandma, I'm really not frightened. I want to be a great master one day, the way you are. I'll have to deal with these things sooner or later."

Her grandmother sighed quietly. "Ah. Do you truly want to be a master that much?"

Ning Shu nodded and nodded. "I do."

"Ah-Ning, tell Grandma. Why do you want it?"

Ning Shu did not want to be a yin-yang master to punish the wicked and raise up the good. She wanted it to look after herself. A skill in her hands and a little of the art, so that when she had nobody left she would not be anyone's to push around.

She told her grandmother what she was thinking, honestly.

Her grandmother was taken aback. "How do you come to be thinking so far ahead? Even when Grandma is gone you'll have your uncle, and you'll have your mother and father. How would you have nobody?"

Ning Shu did not want to tell her about being reborn. In the last life her mother and father had taken no interest in her at all. Her uncle's family had been broken and scattered. Her grandparents had died with the bitterness still in them. All of it, and if there was anyone to blame for it, the blame was that she had been too useless to stop it.

"Grandma, can you really not teach me?"

Her grandmother sighed. "It isn't that I don't want to teach you. The Heavenly Master won't take you through the gate. And if you can't get through the gate you can't be a master."

"What counts as getting through the gate?"

"Ah-Ning, let me put it like this. There's the first sort. They get through the gate and the heavenly eye opens, and their art is strong, and they can set things right and put down demons. Those are the great masters. There are very few who can open the heavenly eye. Of the ones I could name for you, there are fewer than ten in the whole country."

"Then there's the second sort. They get through the gate but the eye never opens. All they'll ever do is read fortunes and read luck, dead things out of books, and they never come to much. Some of them end up working a swindle, the sort people call a fraud. That isn't a master."

"And the third sort can't get through the gate at all. Heaven doesn't grant them this living, and when they read for someone, what they read is wrong."

Her grandmother was the first sort, Ning Shu was sure of it. Through the gate, with the eye open.

"Grandma, how does someone open the heavenly eye?"

"It isn't something you can force. It comes down to your own luck and what you were born with. Mine opened when I was thirty-five, which is reckoned late."

"How do you know when it's opened?"

"You feel it yourself. You can see the three fires over a person's head and shoulders. You can look at the color of someone and see the luck coming to them. You can feel the good air and the baleful air in a place, and you can see unclean things. All told, every sense you have comes open, and you feel every element of yin and yang and the five phases in this world. To open the heavenly eye is to be granted a living by heaven, and great things come of it. I have a friend in the trade who opened hers. She's in Hong Kong now doing feng shui for the great houses there, and her fee starts at six figures before she so much as turns up."

"That's… that's really something." Ning Shu meant it. "Grandma, I want to open the heavenly eye."

Her grandmother rubbed her head. "That isn't a thing you can go after."

Ning Shu thought back over the last life. She had got to twenty-four and nothing had ever opened.

The thought left her flat. But then another one came, and she asked, "If opening the heavenly eye is such a great thing, Grandma, why do you…"

Her grandmother smiled. "You want to ask why I'm still sitting in this broken-down village sorting out people's odds and ends every day?"

"Mm." Ning Shu was a little embarrassed, but she did want to know. Her grandmother's friend commanded six figures. If her grandmother came down from the hills she would be no worse, Ning Shu was certain of it.

"To spy on what heaven has decided, and give away what heaven means to keep, costs you in hidden merit. It eats into your blessings." Her grandmother shook her head. "That friend of mine is past fifty now. She never married and she has nothing behind her to worry about. I have a son and a daughter and this dear little Ningning as well. I would rather be poor all my life than cut into my children's luck and their years."

Ning Shu frowned. So her grandmother meant that to be a great yin-yang master with a name across the country, you had to have nothing behind you.

Her grandmother said, "You can't have everything both ways. It's a question of what you'll give up. But all of this is a long way off."

It was. Never mind the heavenly eye. The Heavenly Master would not take her, so getting through the gate at all was the problem.

Only now did Ning Shu see that being sent back did not put everything within reach. The yin-yang arts were not something you could learn by trying hard. They came down to what you were born to and what was in you.

"Still, if you really want to learn." Her grandmother changed tack. "When I go out on a job I can take you with me. Be around these things enough and something may open up in you."

Ning Shu asked, delighted, "Really?"

"Mm. We'll try it and see. It's the summer holidays anyway. When Grandma goes out on a job from now on, you come along."

Ning Shu nodded and nodded. "Yes, Grandma. I'll carry your case!"

---

Once Ning Shu had started going out on jobs with her grandmother she began to get a feel for the trade. Her grandmother went about things straight and did not bend, and the unclean things were frightened of her for it. Her grandmother said it was not that her art was so great. It was that she carried herself upright, and a straight body does not fear a crooked shadow.

If Ning Shu was going to be a master one day, the thing that mattered most was not learning the art. It was working on her own heart.

Hold to a clean heart, set things right, put down demons and uphold the Way.

That was what a great master was supposed to be.

Ning Shu wandered about the village on her own. She had not come back to Pingshui in years, and seeing all of it again, the things she had grown up among, left her full of feeling.

The villagers were very good to her. One circuit of the village and her clothes and her bag were stuffed with sweets, peanuts, melon seeds and chocolate. Her grandmother was the village's great master, so people came to her with everything. Where to put a house and which way to face it, what to name a baby, every small thing, nothing too trivial.

Her grandmother stood very high in Pingshui. Even the bullies in the village gave way three steps when they saw her. Ning Shu was beginning to understand that when people treat you well and look up to you, it is not because they are afraid of you. It is because they respect you.

Down by the little river she saw her cousin Gouwazi squatting under a tree, fiddling with something.

Her uncle's boy, her cousin, was a year younger than her. His proper name was Ye Yingjun. At home he was Goushengr, or Gouwazi.

The name suited him. He had clean, handsome features, and the only pity was the split under his nose. A harelip. It had been stitched when he was small, but the surgery of the day had not been up to much and it had not healed straight, so his mouth still sat a little crooked. Her uncle had said he would take him to the city this summer and have it done properly, but the farm work had been heavy and it had been put off.

He was a good-looking boy for all the split lip, because her uncle was a handsome man himself. The family bred well. Ning Shu's mother would never have married into a rich house if she had not had the face for it.

And Ning Shu would never have driven Lu Zheng to what he became if she had not been born with a face that stopped the breath.

Her grandmother often said that born too beautiful, your fate runs too sharp, and it ruins your luck.

Sometimes beauty is a sin you are born holding.

Ning Shu went over and gave Gouwazi everything in her bag.

"Here. Eat."

"Thanks, sis!" Gouwazi stood up and slapped the dirt off his hands, tore open a packet of chocolate and pushed it into his mouth.

Ning Shu asked, "What are you doing?"

"Playing with a dung beetle."

Ning Shu looked at the filthy boy beside her. A proper little terror. He could get a whole afternoon out of one insect.

Then, and she did not know why, a kind of panic came over her. As though she were the beetle down there, floundering about, not knowing what to do, frightened out of her wits, held by something she could not see and left to whatever anyone cared to do to her.

Ning Shu frowned and made herself look away and get her breathing back.

Why would she feel that? As if she could feel what the beetle was feeling.

But how would a dung beetle feel anything?

So she said to her cousin, "Don't do this sort of thing any more. Everything that lives has a spirit in it. Even an ant's life. Don't harm one lightly, or you cut into your own hidden merit."

Gouwazi pulled his eyebrows sideways and looked at her as though he had never met her before. "Sis, I keep thinking you've been a different person since you woke up after falling down the slope. You're not like a kid any more. You're like a grown-up. And you talk more and more like Grandma."

Ning Shu thought, I am a grown-up. She had twenty-odd more years on her than he did. Was she supposed to go about making a nuisance of herself like some small boy?

"I'm going to carry on after Grandma one day and be a great feng shui master," Ning Shu said. "I want to learn what Grandma knows, and I want to learn to be as kind as she is."

Gouwazi nodded as though he half understood, and said, "If my sister's going to be a master, I'll be her case-carrier."

"All right," Ning Shu said easily. "You can carry my case."

She crouched down, picked up a twig and turned the beetle the right way up. The moment it was free it pulled itself together and ran, and in a blink it was into the thick grass and gone.

In the instant the beetle got away, everything that had been pulled tight in Ning Shu's chest let go.

She frowned. It was strange.

Just then a voice came. "Crooked-mouth Gouwa. What've you got in your hand?"

Ning Shu turned. Three boys were coming over, fourteen or fifteen by the look of them, half-grown.

It was the summer holidays. The older children in the village were all busy helping their parents in the fields, and the younger ones had nothing to do, so they went about in threes and fives looking for trouble.

The one in front was called Zhang Qiang. He was the little king of the local boys and he was always on at Gouwazi.

"Wah! Chocolate!"

"Any more? I want some!"

"Give me everything in your bag, quick!"

Gouwazi was used to Zhang Qiang getting at him, so he pulled the sweets straight out of his bag without a thought and went to hand them over.

But this time Ning Shu stopped him.

"Don't give him anything."

Gouwazi said shakily, "But if I don't, he hits people."

Ning Shu was not frightened of him in the least. She looked at Zhang Qiang and made herself hard. "I'm warning you. Stay away from my cousin from now on."

Her voice was soft and small, so the pose did not frighten anyone.

Zhang Qiang jabbed a finger at her. "And who are you, to stand there telling me off?"

Soft on the weak and scared of the strong. Ning Shu had seen plenty of them. When she had been making her way through the muck of the entertainment industry, these little boys had still been somewhere playing in the dirt.

Ning Shu said, without any expression at all, "Zhang Qiang. Last week you stole Widow Wang's underwear, and it's still under your pillow. I'd put it back soon if I were you. If it comes out later, your parents will split up, and you'll go with your father, and your father will find you a stepmother, and you'll be sorry then."

Zhang Qiang's face changed on the spot. His lips went white and started to shake. "How… how do you know that!"