Heart and Soul (45 page)

“Very well,” Judge Bao said. “Then there is no longer any reason to hold his soul here, waiting further proceedings.” He looked toward one of the shadows behind his chair. “Go and let loose the soul of Emperor Wen.”

It was the strangest thing. Third Lady was not sure what she’d expected. She supposed she thought the guards would come back escorting Wen’s soul. Instead, as the shadows disappeared down a tunnel to the judge’s left, there was the sound of a door being opened, and then a sound like the whoosh of wind. For just a moment, she saw Wen’s shape rushing through the air as though either blown by wind or pulled by a red cord that seemed to be attached to Wen himself.

Then there was a sound like a slap and suddenly…

There was no difference at all. Wen looked exactly the same. Except that he didn’t. Where he had been almost transparent in this underworld, he was now solid—his broad shoulders, his narrow waist, his long legs all displaying suddenly to greater advantage. And where his eyes had been calm and patient, they now were infused with a shine and an expression of secret humor, or secret mischief. The Wen that Third Lady had no more than suspected existed beneath the subdued exterior of her husband was now fully present and fully in control.

He looked at her with melting love and breathtaking desire, and for a moment all she could do was look back at him, her breath suspended.

Through this, she heard Yu say, “May I then send them back?”

And suddenly, almost as if out of nowhere, there was water rushing in upon them and carrying them, as if on the crest of a wave.

Halls and caves rushed past them. Third Lady got no more than glimpses of knives and tentacles, of leers and strange machines, and only those glimpses allowed her to believe that these people were, in fact, still part of Feng Du.

Then the wave crashed with a deafening sound, and everything went dark.

She blinked and sat up, and realized she was back in the cave where she and Wen had left their bodies.

Beside her, he groaned, and blinked rapidly, and she realized that he, too, was waking up.

A SOLDIER’S DISTRESS

Captain Corridon would never be able to pinpoint
when he’d realized that Hettie had given him the proverbial slip.

He had not been worried when he found she was not in her cabin. She had been very excited about being a passenger in a carpetship. He’d gathered that when she’d traveled before, it had been as a guest of her father’s and under strict orders not to bother the paying travelers. And although she could still not mingle on the first-class deck—since Captain Corridon’s money hadn’t run that high—she had amused herself by walking the second-class deck, talking to anyone who would speak to her, looking down at the vastness of Africa or the deep ocean as they flew over it.

And now, he hoped, she would be watching as they landed in Hong Kong, possibly near the younger people on board. Indulgently, he’d gone around the deck, looking at various groups of girls, and—he’d felt very sure this was Hettie—at a very pretty blond girl surrounded by a group of chattering boys. But it wasn’t her.

Hettie was nowhere to be seen. In despair, he’d taken to the top deck, thinking perhaps she’d somehow talked her way up there, or perhaps someone had invited her there. An encounter with a carpetship employee in uniform delayed him, and he had to show papers that proved he was more than what he appeared to be—a militia captain on furlough.

By the time the man had let him through and Captain Corridon had perused the top deck from one end to the other, and not found Hettie, they had landed. The people on the top deck—young couples, elderly travelers—all looked at him as if he were de-ranged, as he looked in increasingly unlikely places for Hettie Perigord.

Finally, in despair, he’d gone back to their deck, only to find that people were already disembarking, from it as well as from the other decks. But the people who’d left were families with their children. He could still see them on the ground, walking away, going through Customs.

His desperate question to the carpetship employees, “Did you see a young girl disembark alone?” was met with frowns and headshakes, and once with an indignant, “Good heavens, you don’t think we’d let her do that!”

And no, he didn’t think they’d let her do that. But, as consciousness of his loss dawned, he realized he stood on the verge of ruin. If Hettie was gone, he had nothing—nothing at all—to hold over the Perigords. What was more, he had nothing at all to allow him to unravel what might be the greatest conspiracy in English history.

He was not from a wealthy family, and his own portion as a second son was not large enough to purchase him the advance he desired. He’d been counting on the advancement from unraveling this conspiracy to achieve the level of prominence he aspired to. Eventually, he’d like to be the chief of the Secret Service, the lord of Her Majesty’s—or as was far more likely, by then, His Majesty’s—information and spying unit.

And he had been counting on that, he realized, with a half-startled laugh, to convince Lord Marshlake to allow him to marry his daughter, Hester. And on this, his breath caught. Because, how strange it was that he’d been counting on his blackmailing of Hettie’s parents to secure the needed wherewithal to convince them to let him marry her.

The thing was, for all that, it might very well have worked. After all, though he blackmailed them, he would also be doing his utmost to ensure that they did not suffer for being a part of this conspiracy. In fact, he’d been willing to spend considerable effort and endure considerable risk to prevent them from being in any way importuned. Which meant that when all was said and done, they would have been grateful to him.

And he would have the advancement and the fortune. He would be able to afford to keep a wife in the way that Hettie, daughter of Lord Marshlake, deserved to be kept.

But now Hettie was gone and Lord only knew where. The realization hit him, suddenly, that he did not have any idea where Hettie might be, or what she might be doing, and he felt a sinking in his gut as he sat down on the steps to the upper deck with a loud thud. He felt as if his legs were made of rubber.

Hettie. Where could Hettie have gone? And who knew what dangers she might be risking, what terrible trouble she might be facing? As enterprising and win-some as the young Miss Perigord was, she had never been outside her city, outside her neighborhood, outside the confines of her upbringing. She had no idea what dangers could lurk in the fascinating city of Hong Kong for a young girl of her circumstances who de-barked wholly friendless and unprotected.

He held his head in his hands and moaned. He would have to find a locating magician as soon as possible, and he would have to pay him to locate Hettie. She could not be allowed to be out there, running who knew what risks. In his mind, he saw her bound hand and foot and sold into white slavery into the harem of some Chinese potentate, or, worse, into some house of ill-repute. And how could he explain to his superiors that such a slip of a girl had escaped him and left no trace?

“Captain Corridon?” an excessively well-bred voice said, just in front of him.

Adrian removed his hands from in front of his face, and looked up at a very tall man with classical features and the sort of dark curls that foolish romances always talked about but which rarely appeared on real people, much less real men. He would, in fact, have been entirely too handsome to be true were it not for the fact that his left eye was missing and covered with a black leather patch. The other eye was an unusual green color.

Corridon’s mouth dropped open as things he’d heard fell into place. “Peter,” he said. “Farewell. Lord St. Maur. But…but you are…”

“Very far from home,” the man, whom Corridon was almost absolutely sure was a dragon, looked around significantly, as though to show that there were too many people present who might hear them.

But Captain Corridon was not willing to expose Lord St. Maur as a dragon, as he had just realized that here was his solution for Hettie’s disappearance. He got up, on trembling legs, and raised his fists in the accepted position of challenge that would have earned him applause in the fashionable boxing scene. “Where is Hettie?” he said. “What have you done with her?”

But he was wholly unprepared for the emotional punch that came with the drawled response. “My dear fellow! I believe that was my line.”

DRAGON IN THE FOX CAVE

Third Lady woke and sat up, startled. She didn’t know
how much time had passed in this world, but it couldn’t be long, because the fire in which she had burned the paper figures still blazed. By the light of the fire, she turned and watched her husband.

She was sure he had made groaning sounds and that his eyelids had fluttered. He was now breathing slowly and deeply, his chest rising and falling in an obvious way. Even asleep, he looked healthier than she’d ever seen him. There was color in his cheeks, and his skin seemed more golden than pale. In fact, he looked more like the man she had imagined she was marrying than the bridegroom she’d found on her wedding night.

And this brought a sudden alarm. Wen would want to consummate their marriage, she realized, even as his eyelids fluttered open and he fixed her with those newly intent, almost amused eyes.

Her heart skipped a beat. It wasn’t that she didn’t wish for him to consummate their union. In fact, through the lonely years of her marriage, she’d wanted nothing more. She’d dreamed of being taken in Wen’s arms and of sharing with him those pleasures of which the matron who’d instructed the singsong girls had spoken of so often.