Chapter 46

Towards the end of the year Fang Ruoyun took several days off for something at home, and when she came back she looked terrible.

Her roommates were worried about her, and under all their questioning Fang Ruoyun finally said, "My father's ill."

"He went down all at once. It was so sudden none of us were ready for it."

Ning Shu asked, "Ill with what?"

Fang Ruoyun sighed. "The hospital can't find a cause."

"What are his symptoms?"

Fang Ruoyun thought. "He sleeps all the time. Now and then he's clear, and when he is he talks nonsense."

Yi Qiu said, "Illness comes down like a landslide."

Ning Shu said, "I haven't seen him, so I can't say."

Fang Ruoyun caught hold of her hand. "Ningning, would you come home with me and look at my father?"

Seeing the state she was in, Ning Shu said, "Of course. It's the weekend tomorrow. I'll come with you."

"Thank you, Ningning. You're so good."

"Don't mention it."

---

At the weekend Ning Shu went with Fang Ruoyun to the Fang house. The family looked well off. They lived in a good villa development in the city, a three-storey place, with five or six servants and nurses about.

The moment Ning Shu came through the door she felt something in her chest that would not sit right.

The windows were open and the place was wide and bright, and she still felt closed in.

"I'll get you a drink. Juice or Coke?"

Ning Shu shook her head. "I'd rather see your father first."

"All right. He's upstairs."

Fang Ruoyun took her up, and the rest of the family heard them and came out.

"This is my classmate. Her name is Ning Shu," Fang Ruoyun said. "I've brought her to look at my father."

The young woman in front of them glanced at Ning Shu. "Bringing anybody home now, are we? Your father isn't a monkey at the zoo for people to come and look at."

Ning Shu had taken her for Fang Ruoyun's elder sister, until Fang Ruoyun said, "Auntie Zhou, my classmate is a very good feng shui master. When our dormitory was haunted she sorted it out."

"A feng shui master that age? She's having you on." Auntie Zhou poked Fang Ruoyun's head. "Your father isn't dying fast enough for you?"

Fang Ruoyun glared at her and said quietly to Ning Shu, "She's my stepmother."

Then a door beside them opened and Fang Ruoyun's aunt came out supporting her grandmother. The old woman was grey at the temples, and she struck her stick hard on the floor. "What's all this shouting first thing in the morning?"

"Grandma, this is Ning Shu, the one I told you about on the phone last night. She's a yin-yang master and she's very good, and I want her to look at my father."

"Oh. Oh. Master Ning, how do you do, how do you do. Sit down. Li, bring Master Ning some tea," the grandmother said.

Fang Ruoyun's grandmother had a good deal of faith in this sort of thing and was very warm to Ning Shu. Her stepmother still did not want Ning Shu going in.

"I think we should put our faith in modern medicine," she said coldly. "Bringing in some fraud. It's superstition."

Fang Ruoyun said, without any manners about it, "The doctors can't do anything. What's wrong with having a master look at him?"

"If you want a master, get a famous one. Dragging a classmate home is hardly serious." Auntie Zhou looked Ning Shu over coldly. "The girl looks younger than you do."

"But she really is good."

"How do we know she isn't a con artist?"

Ning Shu looked up and considered her, and said coldly, "The space between the brows is the house of fate, and there's a bad mole in yours. They call it the peach-blossom mole, and it goes straight to a woman's marriage. It's what people mean when they say a woman can't be held. You were married before you married into the Fang family. And there are children lines under your eye, which says you have a child, but the lines have faded until they hardly show, which says you gave that child up."

Auntie Zhou's face changed and her lips shook with it, and from the way she reacted Ning Shu knew she had got it right.

The grandmother heard it and looked at her coldly. "There hasn't been a quiet day in this house since you married into it. If Ziqiang pulls through, the first thing I'll do is sweep you out of the door."

She plainly thought very little of her young daughter-in-law.

Auntie Zhou said nothing more after that.

---

The grandmother insisted, and Ning Shu went into the bedroom.

The moment she was through the door her brows drew in. There was a stale, old smell coming at her, cold with it.

Fang Ruoyun's father lay on the bed with several nurses round him.

Ning Shu asked, "Why isn't he in hospital?"

"The doctors can't find anything. He's better looked after at home." Auntie Zhou stood in the doorway with her arms folded, cold about it.

Fang Ruoyun hurried to the bed. "Dad, are you any better? I've brought a master to look at you."

Her father's eyes were unfocused and wandering and there was nothing behind them.

"I want to go home. I want to go home."

Fang Ruoyun said helplessly, "Dad, this is your home."

Ning Shu went round the room and her eye came to rest on the shelves by the desk, where there was antique porcelain set out, and Fang Ruoyun explained, "My father collects antiques. Some of these came from auction houses and some from the markets."

With the heavenly eye open, Ning Shu could tell at a glance which were genuine and which were not. Most of what was on those shelves was fake. But one thing caught her.

It was a fish.

A half-moon of green jade worked into the body of a fish, with an old deep shine on it and a clean line.

That one fish carried enough weight to make every gaudy thing on those crowded shelves look like nothing at all.

The red point between Ning Shu's brows flickered.

There was something foul coming off that half-fish of jade.

Ning Shu looked back at Fang Ruoyun's father. "It's the jade."

The grandmother did not follow. "What about the jade?"

"That piece has not long come out of a tomb. There's nothing of the living on it. It carries the air of the dead, and an ordinary person can't stand being near that. They go down with it."

Fang Ruoyun said quickly, "He bought that at the antique market a few weeks ago. He was very taken with it and he had it in his hands all the time."

The grandmother asked, "If we throw it away, will our Ziqiang be all right?"

Ning Shu said at once, "You must not throw it anywhere. Something with that much in it doesn't shake off. You'd pull worse down on yourselves."

"Then. Then what do we do?"

"If you'll trust me, give it to me and I'll deal with it."

The grandmother was about to agree when Auntie Zhou said, "What did I tell you? She comes in and doesn't look at the illness or the patient, she goes straight for the valuable thing in the house and asks for it outright. And she isn't a con artist?"

Ning Shu had only said what was true. Something that has lain underground that long is soaked through with the cold and damp of the place, and once it comes up and sits beside a living person the cold goes into them. Of course they fall ill.

Which is why anyone buying antiques needs more than an eye for real and fake. People who know the business bring a master in to look a piece over and say whether there is anything of the dead on it, and if there is, to deal with it first.

By the look of it Fang Ruoyun's father was an amateur who knew none of that. He had been buying fakes for years, and the first genuine thing he laid hands on was this, and he had no defence against it.

"I've said what I came to say." Ning Shu said, "Since you don't trust me, find somebody better."

She did not wait for any of them to answer, and walked out of the Fang house.

---

Back at school Fang Ruoyun apologised over and over, and Ning Shu did not hold it against her. The jade fish was worth a great deal and the suspicion was fair enough.

A week later Fang Ruoyun came to her again to say her grandmother had asked her to dinner.

Ning Shu went back to the Fang house for Fang Ruoyun's sake, and this time the family treated her with a great deal more respect. Even Auntie Zhou did not dare say anything rude.

The grandmother wrapped the jade fish up and gave it to her, and gave her a red envelope with tens of thousands in it.

Ning Shu took all of it without any fuss.

It was hers by rights. On the face of it she had come off well, making money and getting an antique jade out of it. In fact carrying a thing like that about does her own body no good at all.

But Ning Shu was curious about where the jade fish had come from, and meant to look into it.

Sure enough, the night Ning Shu took the jade away, Fang Ruoyun's father came back to himself, and over the next few days he mended.

Afterwards he took Ning Shu out to dinner, and over the table he told her he had bought the piece from a dealer at the antique market called Jin Dacheng.

Ning Shu had never had anything to do with the antique markets and knew nothing about any of it.

A few days before Christmas, Ning Shu rang Fu Nansheng and told him the whole thing. Fu Nansheng was interested in the jade fish, so the two of them arranged to have dinner on Christmas Eve and she would bring it for him to look over.

And on Christmas Eve, as Ning Shu was going out of the school gate, Lu Zheng rang her.