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  Park’s face was flushed. “What are you doing?” he complained. “Put it back.”

  “Apologies, Your Excellency,” the servant said, bowing with reverence. “It’s a mistake. This dish was prepared only for the prince’s palate.”

  As the servant placed the dish before the prince, Park’s face went from red, to blue to purple in quick succession.

  His wife, the Lady Lan, gave him a gentle pat on the back, asking, “Are you all right, dear?”

  Even Bolin could see the poor man was anything but. Park held his own throat like he was throttling a chicken. He spluttered into a ’kerchief and stood up, his free hand grasping the air, clutching at the invisible threads of life. His legs wobbled. Then, like some giant felled in battle, he toppled over head-first onto the table, splattering the duck and the sauce over the prince and Lady Lan.

  In the pregnant hiatus, you could have heard tea brewing.

  Bolin was horrified. He was not alone. As he stepped forward to help, everyone at the tables stood up at the same time. Then Bolin noticed the servant in question scurrying towards him and the exit, with a wild, savage look in his eye. His instinct took over and Bolin thrust his halberd out, hissing, “Where do you think you’re going?” The servant stopped a hair’s breadth from the tip of Bolin’s halberd.

  The military physician rushed to the side of the ailing magistrate. He turned Park over and took the man’s three pulses at the wrist. Then, with a quiet reverence, he closed the magistrate’s eyes for the last time. With a sorrowful frown, he announced, “My sincere condolences, I’m afraid he’s on his way to Heaven.”

  “Nooo!” the Lady Lan yelled, pressing his tear-strewn face against her husband’s body.

  The prince seemed to know exactly what had happened and scowled, “Jinyiwei. Arrest that man!”

  The black-robed policemen swarmed around the fugitive and grabbed him by the hair, arms and legs. The man struggled like a demon, kicking and yelling. Bolin gave him a kick as they dragged him out of the hall.

  A Jinyiwei bustled up to the prince and said, “Your Highness, you must leave. The magistrate has eaten poisoned food that was meant for you.”

  The prince brushed him away and turned to the assembly, “I do not fear my nephew. See how he is poisoning our country in the same way he has poisoned our honourable magistrate. I am the only one fit to mediate for humanity between earth and Heaven, to save the Middle Kingdom of Zhongguo and lead it back to the path of the true Tao.”

  Surrounded by anxious Jinyiwei, the prince strode out of the hall. Bolin heard his parting command, “Treble the watch. Find this man’s co-conspirators. I want them all brought to justice.”

  The prince disappeared behind the curtains of his sedan chair, leaving the banquet in pandemonium.

  CHAPTER 5

  Thousand Cuts Liu

  When the wood has been burned,

  We can point to the blackened charcoal.

  Yet when the fire has passed on,

  How do we know where it has gone?

  THE BOOK OF CHUANG TZU

  It was New Year’s Day. Feng had accompanied his parents to the banquet, where he expected to share in his father’s pride as the prince’s guest of honour. Instead, he had witnessed his father’s horrific murder.

  Feng’s head was spinning like a tornado. He stared at his father’s corpse. It seemed unreal, a piece of elaborate theatre. But it was real enough. The Abbot Dong was arranging with other monks for the body to be transported back to the Yamen. It would be kept in a special room in their house for the ritual mourning period.

  The banquet hall was transformed into a temple of sorrow. His mother, the Lady Lan, wore a fine silken dress, a coronet and a necklace of white water pearls – clothes more appropriate for a wedding than a funeral. Her wails and shrieks echoed around the rafters. His mother’s poignant grief was a painful yet salutary reminder that some things can never be changed and how the Great Tao, the underlying fabric of the universe, can protrude into normal life.

  Feng glanced around the banquet hall. The servants stood in the middle of the aisle, clutching trays of steaming food, while appetites were held in abeyance. The guests remained at their tables, eating their disappointment at the abrupt end to the banquet. A few courageous ones edged towards the entrance where they stood fingering their robes, waiting for the right moment to slip out unnoticed.

  Feng choked on the enormity of what had just happened. His father was no more. His mother was a widow. He was the head of the household. The province had lost a fine magistrate.

  He watched as the servants beat a hasty retreat into the kitchens and more guests slunk away, twitchy and uncomfortable around the noxious smell of murder. Death was the ultimate unknown. It frightened them. It frightened Feng. He kept glancing at his father, prostrate on the table. He half-expected him to wake up and start discussing some arcane legal matter with him. It didn’t happen. It was never going to happen. All he could hear was his mother’s grieving sobs and Dong’s guttural intonation of a Taoist prayer.

  A mangy cat scuttled under one of the tables in search of scraps. A few friends and work officials of Park paid their respects and excused themselves. Only Bao, the assistant magistrate, hung around like a vulture waiting to pick at the carcass. The servants re-entered the hall and started scoffing the uneaten food strewn across the tables, their hunger overriding their sense of decency.

  “Stop that!” Feng railed at them. “At least wait until they’ve taken my father away. Show some respect!”

  Bequeathing him a scowl and a rebuke, they shuffled back to their empty lives and grumbling stomachs. This was really how people regarded his father, who was in truth an honourable man who had tried his utmost in a dishonourable job, who had punished himself to punish people. For all his supreme efforts, what had Heaven bestowed on him – an unwanted dose of poison and a hollow commendation for saving his prince’s life? A premature end, more like, and where was the honour in that? It was not his father, but the prince, who should have chewed on that poisoned duck meat.

  The late afternoon shadows enhanced the profound sense of melancholy that pervaded the hall. His mother was surrounded by a knot of sisters, aunts and servants, wailing and beating their chests. Outside this coterie of sorrow, Feng found himself making a low growling sound, like a prowling wolf. Was that how he grieved for his father? Or was he sinking into the abyss? He had to find a way out.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder. It felt like the cold finger of death.

  “Who’s that?” he snapped. “Oh, Bao, it’s you. I nearly jumped out of my skin.”

  “Have you got it?” the man asked, as bitter as bile.

  As far as Feng was concerned, Bao was one of those creatures who slithered along the ground, reared up and bit you when you least expected it, often followed by an injection of poison. While Bao had been assistant magistrate to his father, Feng had tolerated him. Now his father was gone, why maintain the pretence?

  “Got what? My father’s been murdered,” Feng spluttered. “This had better be important.”

  Bao re-tied his hair bun and adjusted his robes of office. The man was ingratiating.

  “It is. The crimson envelope – the prince should have given it to your father.”

  “Oh, the envelope; yes, my father has it,” he stammered. How could he have forgotten? New Year’s Day was the day of the prince’s clemency. Inside the crimson envelope was a list of prisoners who were to be pardoned. Should the prince’s wishes not be executed, the subtle balance of yin and yang and Heaven and earth would be upset and that would be deeply inauspicious.

  “I’ll get it then,” Bao said and moved towards his father’s corpse.

  “No!” Feng shouted, barring his way. “Get away from him!”

  Feng reached into his father’s inner pocket and felt for the papers. The body was still warm. And he’d
touched it! Yuck! Afraid, he pulled his hand away.

  “It doesn’t bite,” Bao scowled. “Here, let me.”

  “No!” Feng insisted. “I said don’t touch him.” Feng reached into his father’s inner pocket, pulled out a wedge of papers, amongst which was the crimson envelope.

  Bao grabbed at it.

  Feng pulled his hand away, saying, “On second thoughts, I’ll take it to the jail myself. I’ve accompanied my father there before. I’ll read the list.”

  “That’s not possible,” Bao complained. “Now your father has gone, I am the acting magistrate and will perform his duties.”

  “Until the prince announces his replacement; I think that will be me.”

  “You?” Bao rolled his eyes. “You couldn’t read the Emperor’s calendar, let alone step into the magistrate’s shoes!”

  His fists clenched, Feng felt a flash of anger before remembering where he was. Taking a deep breath, he replied, “Fine. Then come with me.”

  He was surprised when Bao agreed. After taking leave of his mother, he set off with Bao for the jail in the comfort of his father’s official sedan chair.

  At this time of early evening, the Yamen administrative district was full of officials going home, porters pulling carts, wagons trundling along with supplies of wine and rice, and clandestine meetings between soldiers and their lovers.

  Tonight, it was as quiet and deserted as the snowy peaks of the Yanshan Mountains. Everyone had gone home, shocked at the magistrate’s tragic murder. The ugly filaments of the civil war had intruded into their lives and they were afraid.

  The stark image of his father’s bulging, terrified eyes, as his noble spirit squeezed out of his every pore, drenched his mind. His head swirled with thoughts of missed opportunities. How had he failed to foresee it? Why did his father accept the honour of hosting the prince, meaning he would sit next to him at a table, exposing himself to this awful family feuding?

  Feng knew they were approaching the prison – not so much from his familiarity with the locale, more from the toxic mix of sulphur and fear which smacked his nostrils. He had smelled it many times, because a narrow alley separated the prison cells from his father’s magistrate’s chambers, where he was a frequent visitor. As a boy, the noxious odour had given him a belly-full. Not anymore: since then, he had acquired a taste for it. The fat guard at the prison cells’ door woke up and grabbed a lantern from its cradle, shedding light into the gloomy alley.

  “It’s you, Master Feng.” The guard stifled a yawn. “Sorry to hear of your father’s…”

  “Yes, it’s me,” Feng scowled. “Wake up and let me in.”

  The guard looked aggrieved and hustled to unlock the door, the key clanging in the cold lock.

  “Did you bring…?” the guard murmured.

  “Of course, I did; why do you think I’m here?” Feng waved the crimson envelope in front of him.

  “It’s just… the prisoners were asking,” the guard added.

  Bao led him down some steps to the cells. Another long corridor stretched out in front of them, dark in the evening shadows, hiding the prisoners’ faces as they huddled together in a cell no bigger than a broom cupboard.

  Bao stopped in front of a row of cells that housed the worst offenders and motioned for the guard to unlock the door. In anticipation, the prisoners stood up; at least, those who could. Many wore heavy, bulky cangues, rendering their lives only a little better than a centipede’s.

  “One of you is amongst the lucky ones,” Feng said.

  “Is it me?” One of them chimed.

  “You, Suitong?” Bao guffawed. “We’d sooner release your worst nightmares into Heaven than let you walk amongst the innocent people of the Zhongguo.”

  “It must be me,” cried another. “The magistrate promised.” His voice sounded like he didn’t fully believe it himself. Feng certainly didn’t. Even at his tender age, he’d heard it all before.

  As Feng announced the name of the first man to be pardoned, he was drowned out by a loud, prolonged scream that seemed to rise up out of the bowels of the earth. It came from the ‘underworld’, the vault where they were applying legal strictures to his father’s killer. The sound of the scream was like a delightful blessing to Feng.

  “Here,” he said, shoving the crimson envelope into Bao’s hand. “This is what you wanted. You announce the names.”

  “Where are you going?” Bao asked.

  “To follow the screams,” he said, as another horrific yell pitched into the world, terrifying even the devils in Yama. Feng grabbed a lantern. Never was the descent into the underworld so satisfying, a path he knew from his visits with his father. Soon he was lowering his head beneath the lintel of the torture chamber, where he made a bow of reverence to Thousand Cuts Liu, the undisputed king of the underworld.

  Liu was a torturer, a very successful one. So successful that other jailors came from as far as Beiping to study his methods at first hand. He had perfected a gruesome ability to bleed the victim dry yet keep him alive for prodigious lengths of time, all the while extracting layer on layer of confession.

  By the time Feng arrived, Liu had ushered his victim halfway to hell.

  His father’s murderer was sitting in a high-backed wooden chair, his hands and legs bound tight to the armrest and chair legs. The chair was perched on a plinth the height of a man’s hand, so the murderer’s legs rested on thin air. The murderer was covered by a loin-cloth and an ample coating of sweat and fear.

  Major Renshu was also present, a cruel satisfaction in his eyes. There were a few wicker torches cradled along the walls. The vault was bathed in shadows and the stench of human excrement, which didn’t deter Liu, who on the contrary seemed to thrive on it. Feng sighed. This was a wretched place, but there was nowhere else he would rather be.

  “Your name?” Liu hissed, wielding a scythe-like instrument. While waiting for a reply, he made small nicks in the murderer’s skin; on his arm, torso and forehead and, most excruciating of all, on the base of his feet. Each nick joined the scores of others that sat like neat stitches in the tapestry he was weaving on the man’s torso.

  “Shun,” the man yelled. Liu made it sound like an eerie confession.

  Shun squirmed on his throne, twisting his head from side to side, trying any which way to blot out the slow, deadly, accumulation of suffering.

  “And who sent you?”

  “I told you,” Shun replied. The timbre of his voice betrayed his agonising pain. The man was a whisker from surrendering. Soon he’d be glad to spill his darkest secrets and, if necessary, condemn the whole lineage of his ancestors.

  “Tell me again,” Liu snarled, as he extracted every last morsel of fear and loathing from the man.

  “The Emperor!” Shun shouted, as Liu traced the blade across Shun’s blood-stained skin.

  So, the prince was right. As Liu bent over him, Shun spat with defiance in his face. A huge man, Liu was not given to taking spittle from anyone. Liu had once been a blacksmith’s assistant and broken the neck of a donkey that had inadvertently kicked him. In hauling his scythe across the nerves at the base of Shun’s left foot, Liu showed admirable restraint. Shun displayed none whatsoever and screamed the walls down. He should have known that in the underworld, no one would come to his rescue.

  As the echoes died, along with yet another part of the man’s soul, Liu was back in Shun’s face. “A snail leaves a distinctive sign of its slow progress, just like you did. It’s inconceivable that you executed this plan alone. I want the names of your associates and I want them all now,” Liu growled.

  “I-I worked alone,” Shun stammered, his eyes flickering open and closed with the pain.

  “I don’t believe you,” Liu said, adding more crimson threads to his loom.

  Shun’s eyes closed and his head lolled to one side. He had fainted. Despite Liu’s guileful and
inventive persuasions, he failed to rouse him. Liu crossed his legs and confessed to his one weakness, “I have to piss. But don’t go away, I’ll be back.”

  Sweat pouring off his forehead, Renshu licked his lips. “We’re almost out of water. Feng, will you fetch some for us?”

  “All right,” Feng replied. “But he’s a murderer. Watch him.”

  “Of course,” Renshu said.

  Feng made his way to the well head, lifted the iron casing and dowsed his face in water. That felt good. Liu joined him, having finished his latest trip to the latrine.

  “Nearly there?” Feng asked, excited by witnessing a master craftsman at work.

  “See for yourself,” Liu grunted, his eyes bright with the light of success. “This man won’t leave the chamber until he’s coughed up every last morsel of information, I guarantee you that.”

  A loud scream escaped from the chamber.

  “That was the major,” Feng snapped. “Something’s wrong. Quick!”

  Liu moved like a lithe dragon, Feng not far behind him as they raced back.

  Shun was sitting on his throne, his head was slumped to one side. Liu grabbed his hair knot and yanked his head back. Shun’s skin was purple, his eyes bulging. His mouth frothed crimson bubbles.

  “What the hell has gone on here?” Feng snapped.

  “He’s dead!” Renshu cried, his face a picture of contortion.

  “I can see that!” Liu yelled.

  “How? What do you think happened?” Renshu snarled, shaking his head.

  “I-I don’t know,” Feng said, clasping his head in his hands.

  “I was so close to breaking him into little pieces,” Liu hissed. “Now we’ll never know his associates.”