Shanghai (56 page)

Like the Carvers before him, he was fully versed in the lore of Q'in She Huang's Ivory Compact and knew in great detail the history of the revealing of the first and third windows to the Chosen Three. But unlike many of his ancestors, the Carver had a real interest in
what caused things to happen in the natural world, something not always present in accomplished artists. The Carver, from the very first time his father had shown him the object, had been curious about the sealant that must have been used all those years ago on the Holy Mountain to preserve the ivory and its carvings—both hidden and revealed.

He put his hand on the relic, knowing that the cool surface beneath his palm had been touched by his honoured ancestral patron, the Eunuch Chesu Hoi, and by the First Emperor himself.

The Carver knelt and peered in at the vision of the Age of White Birds on Water. He knew that this portal had been opened by blood. He also knew that the third portal, the Age of the Seventy Pagodas, had been opened on the Holy Mountain by the First Emperor himself. As well, he knew that “only those in the darkness of the Age of White Birds on Water” would be able to open the sealed second portal.

He stood and moved his taper closer to the surface over the closed portal. There was filigree there, as on the rest of the Tusk's surface, but it appeared to be no more than decorative etching.

He returned his attention to the first portal—all those whirling Han Chinese men that they now knew were not sucking on reeds but rather on opium pipes. Opium had ushered in the darkness of the Age of White Birds on Water. Momentarily he peered into the third portal, at the vista of Seventy Pagodas. Then he looked back at the closed second portal.

He stood again and took two steps back from the relic. He knew there had to be something in the sealant of the second portal that had stopped the First Emperor from opening it for the Chosen Three on the Holy Mountain.

“Something that was not present in that time on the Holy Mountain but is now—in the Age of White Birds on Water—present,” he whispered.

The Carver felt a tingle at the base of his spine. He began to speak aloud again, but slowly. “Q'in She Huang opened the first window with blood. The First Emperor's uniting of China was an exercise in blood. His armies viciously suppressed all opposition to uniting China, to building the Grand Canal, and to standardizing the character writing of our people.” He stopped. He knew he was close to something important. He knew that anyone who had resisted Q'in She Huang could expect a bloody response. The First Emperor's uniting of China had drenched the soil of the Middle Kingdom in its people's blood.

The Carver slowed his breathing and forced himself to concentrate. “Blood was the essence of the First Emperor's time.” He smiled and spoke aloud again. “Blood was the essence of that time, so blood opened the first portal.” He paused and tried to get the words from his brain to his tongue. Something—hundreds and hundreds of years—was resisting him giving voice to his thought. But he finally got words to his throat, then out into the emptiness of the cavern. “Blood was the essence then—opium is the essence now.”

It took him several days of trials, but on the fourth day he pulled back the banana leaf that covered a ball of raw opium and, after brushing aside the remaining
lewah
and the poppy trash, took a small quantity of the sticky stuff and applied it directly to the closed second portal. In short order a crack appeared in the solid surface of the ivory, then a second, and finally the outline of two large panels. The Carver gently inserted a slender chisel into one of the cracks and applied the
slightest pressure—and immediately the two panels fell to the floor, revealing a small scene of Han Chinese men, without shaved foreheads or long Manchu-imposed braided queues, in a cave, bent over a table, staring at something on the table's surface. What exactly they were staring at he could not make out. As his eyes adjusted he saw, behind them, three women in what the Shanghainese would now call modern dress.

He stepped back from the Tusk. Both the first and last of the portals had inscriptions overtop of them: “The Age of White Birds on Water” and “The Age of the Seventy Pagodas.” But there was no inscription over the middle portal.

He knew that couldn't be right, and he began to experiment further with the opium.

On the following night he blew opium smoke directly into the second portal, with the vision of the men around a table in a cave, and the three women standing behind them. To his surprise, the surface above the portal cracked, realigning the filigree design on its surface. He ran his fingers over the repositioned etching and it felt as though the lines were no longer flowing and fluid but had formed themselves into the basic square formations of classical Chinese characters. He took a tiny amount of the opium tar and spread it over the etched lines, then carefully removed the excess resin from the surface, leaving only the resin that had entered the filigree tracks. And there it was. In bold, old-style Chinese characters: “A Man with a Book Will Come and a Woman Will Guide His Steps.”

* * *

TWO NIGHTS LATER, the Carver revealed the second portal, to the amazement of the Chosen Three. Even Jiang didn't know exactly what to say. A silence descended on the chamber, then deepened. After more than two millennia, the second portal had finally revealed the step between the arrival of the White Birds on Water and the goal of the Seventy Pagodas.

Loa Wei Fen broke the silence. “Has this changed our task?”

“What do you mean?” Jiang asked.

“The second portal—”

“Is just an interim step,” interrupted the Confucian. “The goal is still the Seventy Pagodas. So our task has not changed.”

“How does the Man with the Book or the Woman fit into the building of the Seventy Pagodas?”

“As we ushered in the darkness of the Age of White Birds on Water, so we now must find and assist the Man with the Book and the Woman to end the darkness.”

“I agree,” said the Carver.

“But how are we to know which man—which woman?” demanded the Assassin.

There was a further long moment of silence, broken this time by Jiang. “He'll be the one most likely to bring the end of the Age of White Birds on Water. That age began with the arrival in force of the
Fan Kuei
's ships. It would only make sense that the beginning of the end of that age will have to do with the
Fan Kuei
leaving the city at the Bend in the River.”

“So we let the
Fan Kuei
in, with their darkness, to build the village at the Bend in the River into the powerful city of Shanghai of today?”

“Yes. We let them in. But now they have fulfilled their role here,” Jiang said.

“Role?”

“Yes,” the Confucian agreed. “That was their role. But they must be replaced by the Black-Haired people now. Only we can build the Seventy Pagodas.”

“And the Man with the Book and the Woman?” asked the Assassin.

“They'll be powerful enough to rid Shanghai of the
Fan Kuei,
” Jiang restated. “He'll give the city they made—back to us.”

The silence in the hidden section of the Warrens was complete. No one moved. They all sensed the gravity of the task ahead—and the danger if they supported the wrong Man with the Book or the wrong Woman.

The
Fan Kuei
had to be bested. On that the Chosen Three agreed. But who would lead the charge against the powerful foreigners? Jiang kept thinking back to the five women in the Narwhal Tusk's first two portals: the Beijing woman, who she assumed was the Dowager Empress, and the figure representing her from the first portal, and now these three women wearing western dress in the second portal. She could see how the Dowager might influence events at the Bend in the River, and, as a member of the Ivory Compact, she certainly had a role to play … but who were the three western-dressed women?

“Who are the potential strong men? Chinese strong men?” asked the Assassin.

“Gangster Tu,” replied Jiang reluctantly.

“Do we want to back him?” demanded the Confucian.

“He certainly is a Man with a Book. It's said that no one refers to the
I Ching
more than him—no one living outside a monastery, that is.”

“True,” the Confucian said, “but remember, once an arrow is launched skyward, even the best archer cannot be sure of where exactly it will land.”

“True, but a cruel hand can be put to good use,” Jiang responded.

Heads nodded.

“Who else?”

“There are several compradors whose growth is worth watching.”

“Watching, yes, but not pursuing. And which among them can even read, let alone be called a Man with a Book?” demanded the Confucian.

Jiang nodded. She was thinking,
And none of them has three daughters
.
Chinese girls who wear western clothes and whose feet have not been bound
.

“Why not back several different possibilities?” asked the Carver.

There was a general agreement to this, accompanied by the usual platitudes about not putting all one's rice in one bowl, all one's savings in one hiding place, and on and on. Everyone in the room knew that they were approaching a crossing point.

The Confucian spoke first. “At this time, Tu Yueh-sen is our only serious candidate.” Then he turned away from the others and assumed what Jiang thought of as his “teacherly attitude”—which she hated—and said, “Perhaps our best way of helping Gangster Tu is to gain him a temporary
Fan Kuei
ally. Is it possible, for example, to get one of the
Fan Kuei
families to back Tu against the other
Fan Kuei
families? The
Fan Kuei
hate
each other more than they do us. Perhaps we can use them against each other.”

Jiang nodded. Not a bad suggestion. “Who amongst you can get to Gangster Tu?”

The Carver spoke up. “I think I may be able to. He's ordered pieces from me.”

“Ah,” Jiang said. “Be careful, Carver, this is a violent man.”

“So if you can speak to Tu, which one of the
Fan Kuei
trading houses do we have access to?” asked the Confucian.

“I deal with the Vrassoons, as well,” said the Carver, much to everyone's surprise. “They pay exorbitant amounts for cast-off pieces.”

“Good,” Jiang said. “Get them together—it's a start.”

—

Jiang's family and the Assassin's had often worked in concert in the past. Both knew well the story of the placement of the original Loa Wei Fen in the History Teller's troupe, so it did not surprise Jiang when a gentle tapping on her third-floor bedroom window interrupted her sleep later that night.

She unlatched the window. The Assassin leaped from his perch on the outside wall to the rug in Jiang's private chamber with no more difficulty than a normal man has standing from a chair.

They did not bother with the niceties of tea but started right in.

“The Carver's introduction of Tu to the Vrassoons is a good beginning, but only a beginning.”

“True,” the Assassin said. “We need to gain Gangster Tu's confidence if we are to get close to him.

Otherwise there is no way to keep track of a man like Tu Yueh-sen.”

“I'm already close to him,” Jiang said. An odd pride had crept into her voice.

“Pillow close,” Loa Wei Fen responded, “but not close to his heart. His heart is in his business. I must get close to him that way.”

“Men tell tales in bedrooms that they'd never tell in other places. Tu wants revenge against the
Fan Kuei
and believes that the only way to do it is to beat them at the opium trade—and I'll encourage him in that thinking.”

Loa Wei Fen nodded. He agreed with that assess-ment—everyone in Shanghai agreed with that assessment.

Then Jiang shocked him. “I will arrange it that the only way he can get his stake in the opium business is to attack one of their great ships.”

Loa Wei Fen was astounded. No one had ever attacked an Indiaman sailing ship. “How will …?”

“That is my business. Yours is to be ready. To follow him. And when he attacks the ship, make yourself invaluable to him. Only if the danger is high and the stakes enormous will a man like Tu Yueh-sen take the chance of allowing someone like you close to him. He is no fool. You are clearly no ordinary thug. Only if he is distracted and desperate can we expect him to accept you. And that is what we need—for him to accept you, Loa Wei Fen, as a Red Pole in his Tong of the Righteous Hand.”

Just as the History Teller accepted my namesake,
he thought.

By morning they had coordinated their plan to set up Gangster Tu. Loa Wei Fen then asked, “Do you wish to share the rest of your plans?”

“What makes you think I have more plans?”

His head was shaking before she finished her lies, and with a smile he said, “It is dangerous to underestimate the head of the Guild of Assassins.”

She stopped mid-sentence and nodded. “True. We both use our weapons, Loa Wei Fen. You your skill and your swalto—me my guile and my daughters.” She looked at the powerful man, then asked, “Tea?”

He canted his head and said, “Please.”

April 1893

Gangster Tu's Red Poles sat with him around the large, round table in Jiang's private dining room and cheered as the madam's youngest daughter, Yin Bao, removed her petite, silk-embroidered shoe—no more than three inches long—to reveal her tiny left foot, her “Golden Lotus.” With great show the young courtesan placed the slipper in the centre of the circular table and then put a slender crystal champagne glass in it. “A game of Raft, perhaps, gentlemen?” she suggested, with a startling naïveté.

Raucous shouts from the men greeted her suggestion. Shortly the shouts turned into a bizarre chant of “Raft! Raft! Raft!”