Five Odd Honors (39 page)

The augury doesn’t make sense,
Pearl thought.
Or if it does, I don’t like what I see.

Pearl forced herself to examine the tiles spread in front of her, one hand rising inadvertently to cover her rapidly thudding heart.

These panic attacks are happening far too often,
she chided herself.
Where is your legendary courage, Pearl Bright?

A voice within her answered,
Where it has always been, Ming-Ming, mostly within your imagination. When before these last few months did you ever really face a challenge that required courage?

But Pearl ignored that doubting, self-critical voice, concentrating on the tiles. There were twelve tiles in which the same sequence of numbers repeated over and over again, then two of the blank tiles that Pearl preferred to use to represent the white dragon.

“Pearl?” Nissa’s voice broke into Pearl’s reverie: sharp, concerned. “Pearl? What’s wrong? Why don’t those tiles make sense? Do you need some water?”

“No water,” Pearl said. “Just a moment, I’ll show you what’s wrong.”

Forcing her hands not to shake, Pearl rearranged the tiles so that they showed the order it had taken her a moment to perceive. The numbers 4-2-4, repeated twice with tiles from the characters suit, then twice more with tiles from the dots suit. She laid these in sets, then followed them with the pair of white dragons.

“Four, two, four,” Nissa said, puzzlement in her voice, “and a pair of white dragons. That’s not a limit hand I remember, but it certainly looks as if it could be one. It wouldn’t even score mah-jong, because those four-two-four patterns aren’t runs.”

“No, this isn’t any limit hand you would know,” Pearl said. “Our ancestors spoke the Chinese of the Lands, and although the pronunciations are not the same, the pun did translate.”

“Pun?”

Pearl slowed down, reminding herself that Nissa, like Riprap and Brenda, spoke Chinese only by virtue of a spell. Likely the subtleties of the language did not translate.

“In Cantonese,” Pearl said, “four-two-four is considered a very unlucky number. In fact, all by itself, the word ‘four’ is considered unlucky because four sounds very much like the word ‘to die.’ ”

“Okay,” Nissa said. “What makes this worse? Wouldn’t four, four, four be worse?”

“It would be pretty bad,” Pearl admitted, “but four, two, four is worse. Through a similar pun, it sounds like the words ‘to die and die again.’ ”

“That is bad,” Nissa admitted.

“Very,” Pearl agreed. “Depending on one’s religious leanings, the phrase can be taken as predicting many deaths in one family, or to mean that one is bound on the wheel of incarnations and will never reach nirvana. Either way, it’s not a number one wants to see.”

“No,” Nissa agreed. “And especially not followed by a pair of white dragons, right?”

Pearl waited, interested to learn if Nissa was indeed following her train of thought.

“White is the color of death,” Nissa said. “Unlike the red dragon tile, which really has nothing to do with dragons, but means ‘center,’ or the green dragon tile, which is labeled with a word that means growth or increase; the white tile is simply called ‘white.’ ”

“Des has been a good teacher,” Pearl said.

“Well, Riprap insisted that he understand why the ‘dragon’ tiles didn’t have the same characters on them if they were all dragons,” Nissa said. “We went over the meanings a couple of times from different points of view.”

Nissa frowned and ran her index finger over the tiles. “All right. I agree with you. These tiles supply a very ominous answer. What question did you ask?”

“The same one we agreed on,” Pearl said. “Was Thundering Heaven behind my nightmare?”

“This doesn’t seem to be much of an answer,” Nissa said, “but it’s too organized to be just a fluke. To die and die again . . . I suppose that could mean, ‘Yes. He wants to scare you to death repeatedly.’ ”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Pearl said. “That’s quite a good interpretation. However, I wonder. The suit most usually associated with the tiger is bamboo.”

“Because of tigers in the jungle?” Nissa asked. “Oh! And because the Tiger’s color is green, and lots of sets print at least some of the bamboo in green. I see your point. There’s not a single bamboo here.”

“No,” Pearl said. “Do you mind if I break these tiles up? Just looking at that sequence makes me nervous. I was raised within the Chinese culture, and old superstitions die hard.”

“Even though your mom wasn’t Chinese?”

Pearl nodded and when Nissa didn’t protest, she swept her hand through the tiles.

“Even so. Thundering Heaven never acclimated. He ate only Chinese food, and in those days that meant shopping in specialty markets. Since my mother’s spoken Chinese was limited, I usually helped with the shopping. A lot of the superstitions of our neighbors rubbed off.”

“I can see that,” Nissa said. “Even if the message is cryptic, we’ve learned one thing. Whoever is sending those dreams d oesn’t mean you well. I wonder . . . You asked if Thundering Heaven sent the dream and we got this cryptic answer. Can we at least clarify if your attacker is from among the Orphans or perhaps connected to one of the indigenous magical traditions?”

“You’re thinking of Franklin Deng or his associates,” Pearl guessed. “You’re wondering if they’ve slipped through my wards somehow.”

“I am. I’ve never been quite happy with Deng showing up to the rescue when you had that ‘heart attack.’ Maybe he was just keeping track of you like he said, but maybe . . .”

“I don’t see how checking further could hurt,” Pearl said. “Why don’t you make certain Lani is still sleeping soundly while I think about how best to go about it.”

Nissa came back a few minutes later, a tall tumbler of iced tea in one hand.

“Lani’s out like a light. I don’t think she slept well last night. Even little kids can get stage fright.”

“I know,” Pearl said with a soft smile that hardened at a thought. “And if Lani heard you getting up to check on me, that wouldn’t have helped. Let’s do what we can to eliminate those nightmares. She, at least, deserves sound sleep.”

“Will the auguries answer a simple yes/no question?” Nissa asked.

“Yes,” Pearl said, “and, well, no. The problem is very few questions have such simple answers.”

“How about ‘Do you like pickled beets?’ ” Nissa asked flippantly. “I could firmly answer ‘no’ to that.”

“Let’s use that as an example,” Pearl said. “What do you mean by ‘like’? The taste, the color, the texture? Would you eat pickled beets if the alternative was starvation? Would you eat them if the only other option was eating dog shit?”

Nissa raised her eyebrows. Like most young mothers, she so habitually avoided crudities or obscenities that she was shocked by the use of them by others.

“All right. I see your point. So if we ask, ‘Is the person sending Pearl nightmares one of the Orphans?’ and the answer we get is ‘no,’ that doesn’t rule out one of the Orphans working in collaboration with someone else—someone, say, who is actually doing the spell casting.”

“Exactly,” Pearl said. “Or if one of the Orphans is an unwitting tool of whoever is behind this, then we might get a ‘yes’ answer, but that might be inaccurate.”

“You mean like the time Honey Dream used Gaheris Morris to get into this house so she could try and rescue Foster,” Nissa said. “Technically, Gaheris was innocent, but an augury would have shown him as guilty.”

“Precisely. So we need to phrase our queries as carefully as possible, and then do a series of auguries to confirm that what we think we read from the tiles is actually the correct answer.”

“Sounds as if it’s going to be a lot of work,” Nissa said.

“It will be,” Pearl agreed, “and our sequence of readings will probably stretch out over several days. Doing the auguries uses ch’i, and we don’t dare deplete ourselves too greatly when our allies might need us at a moment’s notice.”

Nissa, who had been reaching toward the mah-jong tiles, froze with her hands in midair.

“Do you think that likely?”

“The last message I had from Des said that they were in the middle of an area he referred to as ‘the mountains of metal.’ It was a very short message. Had we not prepared in advance, I don’t think the message would have reached us.”

“That’s not good,” Nissa said.

“But it is not necessarily bad. Des mentioned no losses, no specif c injuries.”

“But they’re not having an easy time of it,” Nissa said. “Okay. I get it. We can’t wear ourselves out. Still, we can do at least one other augury today. Where do we start?”

“I would like to see if we can rule out the Orphans,” Pearl said. “And after them, if we can rule out our allies who reside at Colm Lodge. I think asking something like: ‘Are one or more of the living Thirteen Orphans behind Pearl’s recent nightmares?’ might be a good choice.”

“Maybe we should start even further back,” Nissa said. “Can we query whether your nightmares are, well, natural or sent?”

Pearl considered protesting. Hadn’t she made clear that she didn’t think she was harboring any undue anger or resentment? Therefore, her nightmares must be unnatural.

Ah, Pearl Bright,
she asked herself,
but what if you’re lying to yourself? That has been done before.

“Very well. We’ll start with that question. Let’s build the wall.”

By the time Lani woke up, eager to reprise her big day in song and story, Pearl and Nissa had confirmed that the nightmares were indeed unnatural.

Nissa had insisted that she felt not the least trace of ch’i depletion, so they had gone on and confirmed that the source of the nightmares was connected to the incident with the car and to Pearl’s near heart attack.

“Not much,” Nissa said, reviewing the tidy notes she’d been making. “Will this information be of any help?”

“A little,” Pearl reassured her. “At least we know I’m not going crazy.”

The next
afternoon, following a very prosaic lunch of bacon cheeseburgers, fries, and sweetened iced tea, Parnell took Brenda away to fairyland.

Or to the land of the sidhe, which was just about the same thing in most Irish legends.

They ambled across campus in the general direction of the Congaree River. At some point, Brenda became unsure of their surroundings. This surprised her. She’d done a lot of walking during her freshman year, getting to know her new home in detail, since this was the first place she’d ever lived on her own.

She’d been so aware of what a momentous event that move had been: on her own, no parents watching over her shoulder. Yet, after the events of the summer, Brenda’s excitement—no, she decided to be honest with herself: her sense of self-importance—seemed very trivial.

Now they walked through a small copse of trees, trees Brenda felt she should recognize, but didn’t. Then Parnell directed her to a particular tree. With hardly a pause, Parnell lifted one hand, placed it against the smooth bark. The tree did not so much open as slide aside. They walked through the gap, into twilight.

Three steps, four, and then they were in full light. Even had she been so inclined, Brenda would have been unable to deny that they were definitely somewhere else.

“That easy?” she gasped.

The sky above was a perfect blue, the winds herding a few scattered clouds that seemed set against the pale firmament for contrast, like a beauty mark on an old-fashioned belle’s face.

The grass beneath Brenda’s feet was a rich, living green. A green that gave rise to poetry about “green and pleasant lands,” and emerald isles.

In the distance, Brenda could just glimpse a line of what she recognized as ocean, an indigo hue to challenge the paler blue of the sky above, touched with grey and silver. Sea spray played tag with wheeling gulls.

Brenda remembered the Orphans’ labors to make their own gate, in a warehouse smelling of cotton candy and animal feed. She remembered the wonder of scribing ornate characters into soft wood and seeing them glow as they took hold.

It had all seemed marvelous at the time—a wonder, a fantasy come true—but compared to this . . .

Push aside a tree and walk a step or two into fairyland.