Chapter 3.5: Following the Characters

Juanyun was following the characters.

They had not been there the day before, but now they were ubiquitous; it was like a sudden, beetle-infested summer had come alive in her apartments, and each beetle was a gnarled acrobat in some unlikely pose. They lurked in places she could not miss them, inked under and beside things that she used every day; loomed up in places where her gaze was accustomed to rest. After a time, they began to appear in subtler places; the folds of a curtain, the shadows cast by an ornamental tree, the makeup brushes scattered on her vanity. There was no way to piece the characters into a story, but neither was there any need; their message was obvious.

Book. Library. Secret. Discover. Treasure. Betrayal. Father. Grandfather. Ancestor. Inheritance. Skill. Fear. Power.

There was something in Niaochao, and Vermillion Sparrow was going to find it.

And, upsettingly, someone was making her find it.

But, regardless, she followed the characters, and after a time, she began to hunt them, to reply to them. Treasure? It became Where?, and that became Darkness, and soon the girl was wandering through the catacombs of her forebears with torch and brush in hand. The characters preceded her, carved in the dust or painted into the walls, warned her of spiders and led the way to the left and right.

Finally, Yan Juanyun came to a door, enigmatically marked with the character niao, bird. Beneath it was a geomancer's compass, marked with characters and numbers and the nonsense glyphs of the feng shui code, a rosette of concentric rings. There was a handle in its centre, where the needle should have been. She touched the wheel, and the rings spun under her fingers, smoothly, as though they had recently been oiled. What to do? She looked again. Niao, in red ink; wheels of characters and numbers and nonsense...the numbers were written in red.

Swearing under her breath, Juanyun struggled to remember the calligrapher's rhyme, and spun the wheels to line up the numbers that contained the strokes of niao; 6-4-2-10,000...and then the wheel spun. More sixes? What matched the four dots? Surely not 6 again. Then she noticed that some of the characters didn't spin with the wheels, but rotated as they turned, remaining upright. She tried those. Then, tiles began to flake off the rings and new characters appeared...

After three more tries, the door clicked open. Behind it was a featureless hall. There were no characters there, only a wide, wet, inky scar trailing down the floor. The hall was cut regularly out of stone, but as she walked along, Juanyun saw the workmanship fade off; the walls became rough, rounded; in some places the stone formations of a cave were as yet unbroken. The tunnel ended in a moon gate, a white ring that was obviously carved of the rare "Winter's Heart" alabaster from the Eastern Nation of Decorum. It was odd to find it here, she thought, and not yet discolored from the clinging, mineraly moisture.

The gate had no barrier, and so Juanyun thrust her torch into the other side. What it illuminated was nothing short of astonishing, though she knew immediately who had built it.

The cave walls receded into the darkness, and Vermillion Sparrow could see a precise replica of Niaochao, at half size, built in silver wire. Ha, a bird cage after the Birdcage. Inside, golden swallows roosted on a silver tree. As she approached, they stirred, and the torchlight flashed painfully off their metal wings. They did not rustle, but clicked and jingled like little strings of coins. Juanyun did not notice it, but above the cage there was the vast, pierced darkness of the sky.

She came closer, and stooped through the closest cage gate. One of the swallows landed in her hand. It had the half-lidded eyes and fiery crown of a little Buddha; a beautiful woman's face! Over it, it had a tiny tied-on beak. It raised its head and chirped words at her.

"Dance with us, little sparrow of Yan." So they danced, and Juanyun smelled the resin of the herbs she crushed with her feet.