Chapter 37 This Will Hurt
THIS WILL HURT
Several miles from Kowloon Walled City, you are walking through the empty Murray Building, alone and unseen. And unaware of what is transpiring in Kowloon, which you’ve left behind.
It is nighttime, and a public holiday, so none of the staff are here.
You have Kit Ling’s keys, and her security passes, but not her face, since you left it to be “discovered” by the police in Kowloon.
That means you can get through doors, but guards need bribing or killing.
You have Cobra Lily’s sword, though, and are not afraid to use it. The consequences don’t matter anymore.
It takes a little time, but you finally arrive in the depths of the Murray Building’s secure supernatural lockup. Where you were once held, for nearly three decades. Fingers trembling, you input the last of the codes into the electronic systems and step inside.
Lights come on automatically. In front, shelf after shelf of bottle gourds await you. To the left is a small room, the very same one where Kit Ling brought you out the first time. It exists to interrogate ghosts safely, though that is almost never done. You won’t be doing it, either.
Instead, you pull out a luopan, of the kind used by fengshui masters, among others, and begin scanning the gourds in each aisle. Ghost-finding is not what the luopan is meant for, but it can work that way in a pinch. The needle spins frantically in the presence of spirit energy.
A crushing number of bottle gourds turn up empty. Those you smash, feeling a twinge of pity for the spirits who withered away in agony within. At least this way there’s a chance their spiritual energy will recycle in some fashion, eventually, though you wouldn’t put money on it happening.
The “filled” bottle gourds go into a large sack. There are too many for a single trip, so you take several dozen at a time and lug them to the roof. Annoying, but you don’t mind the exercise.
“Your time has come,” you tell the bottle gourds, even though they can’t yet hear you. “I’ll set us all free. This city will be sorry!”
On the final trip, you also pick up a jar of temple ink from the nearby storage. You will be writing lots fu talismans tonight, but not of binding or banishing or warding, or even preserving. It is time for a fu talisman of breaking.
Encumbered by the burden, slowed by the limits of human flesh, you leave the basement and begin the long, tedious climb to the roof.
The elevators are switched off, and you aren’t quite sure how to turn them on again, nor do you want to risk creating light and noise.
Best if there’s no risk of anyone disturbing these proceedings.
Besides, what’s the rush? You have all night.
Outside, rain begins to beat against the window. A storm is coming, you think, but only fleetingly. You’re too busy planning what to say to your soon-to-be-freed horde to pay the weather much mind.
When you reach the roof again, the storm is in full tilt. Rain sheets down hard, soaking every surface. The rooftop is flooded with water, and excess flow tips over the edge in a miniature waterfall.
If you were less focused on the task, that might have alarmed you, or prompted you to wonder why it feels like a typhoon is drawing ever closer to you specifically. But it has been a long time since you worried about the kind of supernatural beings who could summon storms.
Instead, you focus on the ritual. Set about carving a wide circle of symbols around the gourds, using Cobra Lily’s sword to score the concrete.
When that circle is in place, it’s time to fill it with monk-blessed ink.
It flows gradually into the grooves, the process hampered severely by the wind and rain.
But it’s far faster and easier than doing each of them individually, and worth the cost in time.
Despite the weather, the monk-blessed ink takes hold as you apply it, in defiance of the elements.
When it is complete, all of these gourds will shatter at once. That’s the moment you’ve been working toward. Three hundred–odd ghosts of exceptional strength and anger will pour out across Hong Kong, killing and wreaking hell as they go. As well they should.
The end of your fu talisman is in sight when the unexpected happens.
Mercy Chan vaults over the railing, feet landing with a sharp splash on the overrun balcony, deliberate in making noise. The noise is a disturbance, and you twist round with alarm in one smooth, continuous motion.
The sight of her takes your breath away.
Skin the color of palest jade, delicate like a paper lantern. Eyes that glow white and pearlescent. A wealth of black hair streams over her shoulders. In her mouth is the hardness of teeth, too many for a human woman, and jagged as a shark’s.
Your enemy should be locked in a barrel beneath a triad building, safely out of the way. The sight of her should send chills of anxiety through every nerve ending.
Instead, you are only amazed.
Even … awestruck, if only briefly.
For she is beautiful, in a twisted way, and something about her sorrowful, ferocious expression restores a hint of the wonder you once felt, long ago. You’re not fully immune to her ghost glamour, not when clothed in human skin.
Tilt your head up, hold her gaze. Neither of you speaks, because neither of you can. It doesn’t matter. Some moments don’t need words. She is holding your body, you realize with shock; somehow, that detail escaped you till now.
Your mind is awhirl. A part of you is angry that Mercy broke out so quickly. The rest of you rather admires her for it. The prison that was supposed to last years has done about three hours, if that.
Perhaps this is just divine destiny. If so, who are you to argue with heaven?
Hello, niece, Mercy says.
“You remember, at last. Took you long enough.” Incredibly, a torrent of emotions stirs in your chest. As it did not do when you killed her again and locked her away.
I do remember, she says. It has come back to me … all of it, everything. I’m afraid I have not behaved very well.
“That’s a hell of an understatement!” you hiss. “You dare show your face to me, even still?”
Because I have to stop this madness! Her gesture takes in the half-finished fu talisman, the city at large.
Kit Ling and Cobra Lily, all the other people in this city, these ghosts you want to free …
none of that is necessary. You can have your body back.
You’ve already killed me. What else is there to do?
“Why would I even want that, Chen Mei Chi? My old, tired body, that you have used, abused, riddled with scars, and worn out? No, thank you! I would never settle for my own skin when I can have a closet full of them.”
She blinks slowly. You want … immortality?
“I don’t want immortality, I simply have it, and so do you. This is a powerful curse, Mei Chi. We can live for all eternity with a thousand different faces. Which you wasted by sulking on an island for years, then traipsing around in my body for even longer.”
Do you know, she says, thoughtfully, I think you might be the first ghost in history to outsmart her own curse. Niece, I must applaud your creativity in learning how to exist forever, even if I disapprove of what you’re doing.
Her attitude is grating. “It’s not about living forever,” you snap. “It is deeper than that. You wouldn’t understand.”
Try me, little girl. You have destroyed a city and killed people I care about to get my attention. Don’t you want to talk? I am here, I am listening.
Almost, you shout that No, I don’t want to talk, I want to punish you forever but you realize with faint chagrin that isn’t true.
Maybe it’s the influence she has, that strange unspoken knack which drives ghosts to speak with her, when they should not. Or maybe it’s simply the full force of the history between you both, bearing down on your tongue with the weight of a thousand angry words.
Whatever the reason, words come pouring out.
“How little you know,” you say, voice crackling. “To be killed, betrayed, and abandoned is one thing entirely. To have your tormentor forget about you, as if all the pain you have ever known meant nothing and could not touch them, is something else entirely. Can you even begin to understand that?”
Of course I can, Mercy says, sincerely. I am the one person in your life who understands that pain so perfectly.
“Then why did you inflict it on me? Do you drown and abandon all the nieces you like, or only the special ones?” Your volume ratchets louder with every word. “It’s as if all that I am, or ever could be, means nothing. I mean nothing to the one person who defines my whole existence. It’s not fair!”
Then what would make it fair? she says.
“Your destruction!” Point at the gourds beside you with a snarl. “That is also what they will want, when I free them. To hurt those who betrayed them. The price of peace is always death, and we need death for our peace!”
Did you feel better when I was stuffed in a barrel, or did you feel the same?
she retorts, and you hiss at her in fury, because she’s not wrong.
I may be a silly old woman, but I do know this much, Siu Yin.
When I drowned the village of Shek Ham Chau, my heart was not calmer at all.
Not a jot, not for a second. I am sure that yours isn’t, either, despite trying to punish me.
You might think that unleashing hell on Hong Kong is going to heal your heart, but it won’t.
She’s thinking of Cobra Lily, telling her a few days ago that this is justice and wishing she’d questioned it. Justice can involve death, and certainly has, but Cobra Lily’s outlook was far too narrow. Just like yours is now.
“Then what will heal me?” you snarl, unable to stop yourself from asking the question. “Since you’re so wise and have so much wisdom!”
Nothing, she says, simply and sadly. Pain and grief are holes that never fill. We just learn to step around them as we walk.
“Not good enough,” you say, ragged and shaken. It’s eerily similar to the sort of thing your father might have said, back when he was alive. “Not fucking good enough!”
One lightning-fast lunge and you swing the flat of Cobra Lily’s sword. All those years of living and training during the war have not gone to waste.
Mercy surprises you. Even as the blade swings down, she is already moving, diving and darting past your left side. You twist to block a blow, but are shocked a second time to find she isn’t attacking. Only moving to a safe distance.
She should be trying to kill you; it’s her only chance to survive. Why else would she come back? She has no options, no possible other plan. You are her monster legacy, existing only to be defeated. Surely, that is how she sees you.
Oh, well. Her weakness is your advantage. You leap forward, sword singing and hair flying in the roiling tempest.
It shouldn’t be close. Mercy never took any kind of formal fighting training, in all her years and lives. She fiddles around with knives and has a good aim, but that’s not the same. You have fought in literal wars and spent time learning weapon techniques.
Except she is fast, an unencumbered spirit compared to your heavy, sluggish body. Every swing is met with empty air. You are burdened by the weight of flesh, moving only as fast as joints allow. And she is less interested in hurting you than avoiding you, which you don’t understand.
Maybe you should be slipping out of this body, too. But that’s risky. If she decides to dissipate her storm, normal sky will return and you’ll die quickly up here without the constant pour of water. It would end her life, along with yours, but you can’t be sure she wouldn’t take that trade.
It has always annoyed you that summoning storms is not in your repertoire. That is all Mercy, and nothing particularly to do with being a water ghost.
She darts to the side, swinging again with furious intent. No point overthinking it. You will stay in this body for now and cut her down, because you are a far better and more experienced fighter than this bumbling middle-aged woman, even if she is a ghost.
And once you’ve trapped her a second time, you’ll make sure she doesn’t get out. Mercy will know what it is like to be forgotten and alone, forever and ever and ever. Then, maybe then, the rage you feel will start to cool. It must.
Leap, and swing. Down comes the blade.
She catches it in her claws, wrests it from your grasp. But instead of striking, Mercy flings the sword out and over the balcony.
“I have more,” you snarl. “More weapons, more bodies, more hate for you!”
So do I, Siu Yin. We can go on like this forever, both of us—immortal in our anger, endlessly cruel and destructive. Is that what you want?
“I’ve told you what I want! I will be the storm that washes away your whole world! I will punish everyone for forgetting, for betraying, for hurting!”
I see. You want to do this the hard way, huh? Mercy draws herself upright, teeth gleaming and claws hanging, the tattered rags of a water ghost plastered to her skeletal form.
You take a step back, wary and tense.
Sung Siu Yin, she says, in a voice as deep and cold as the ocean, before you were even born, I was already dead. Before you drew breath, I bathed in rage. Before you killed a man, I had already drowned a village.
You want to fight? Then we fight! This is my storm, little girl, little niece, and I remember how to sing to it. You wanted me to remember everything? Well, I do. And I had forgotten more than you ever learned.
“Oh shit,” you manage, and then all of that tempestuous power bears down on a single building.
It is like heaven itself has reached down to punch you, with a whirlwind of air so strong that every window shatters in the Murray Building. Debris smashes against nearby buildings, and the air is full of glass. The noise is enough to burst eardrums and you careen wildly, hopelessly off-balance.
Mercy grabs your wrist.
She stands impossibly still amidst that chaos, spirit feet braced on the slick linoleum, ghostly skin sheened with rain. She is light as a feather and should blow away, yet she stands solid as a marble pillar. Her claws hold you fast, keeping you from fleeing.
You stare at her with eyes wide, clutching back at her wrist. Temporarily forgetting that you, too, are an undying ghost.
I’m very sorry, niece, she says. This will hurt.
Lightning strikes directly. It’s just like on Mami’s boat, all those years ago. Only this time, there is no ocean to displace the energy.
Your body explodes.