[continuing chapter 1]
"Why are you just sitting
there?" Wen started, then struggled
to maintain his balance. "You've
just been sentenced to death, and probably unjustly so. You duty to us requires you to prevent this
sentence from being carried out."
My duty to myself
requires that I prevent this, Wen thought.
Slowly he turned his head to the right.
He saw nobody, or at least nobody close enough to have spoken to
him. The peasant picking his nose with
such care definitely couldn't have spoken.
It hadn't been Grandfather, either; the voice was wrong, even if the
invisibility thing fit.
There are other ghosts here?
The voice, Wen realized, had seemed to come from every direction—and
none. "You," the strange voice
added, "continue to be a great disappointment." Suddenly Wen felt a stinging slap on the back
of the head, somehow without actually feeling anything. And then he saw the old man. Yes, he thought, another ghost. This is an unfortunate habit to be starting,
at any time of one's life.
Even if it hadn't been for the unworldly voice and the
slap-that-wasn't, Wen would have known he was looking at a spirit. The old man's robe looked like a scholar's
robe, but the patterns and even the colors ran away and hid whenever Wen tried
to look at them, leaving only smoky shadows of what they might have been. The man's face began with an angry pair of
silkworm eyebrows and scowled its way down to a long, scraggly beard that
suggested sun-bleached seaweed.
"I'm sorry," he said to the ghost, pitching his
voice as softly as he could. "I'm
not exactly in a position to do much about this just now. I'm working on a plan, though."
"You should speak to me with more respect, no matter
what position you think you're in!"
"More respect?
Who are you?"
Wen felt another blow to the head. The invisible hand behind it had given a
distinct sense of boniness. "I am
your Number One Grandfather, you wretch!"
"My what?"
"Don't take that tone with me, you irresponsible
disappointment," said the scraggy ghost, now in front of him,
semi-translucent but still nasty.
"I am your Number One Grandfather and founder of the family. Your should not be letting yourself be
executed: you should be preparing yourself for the job you are about to inherit."
"Inherit?"
Wen stared at the ghost—realizing, as he did so, that the effect had him
staring through the ghost and
straight into the angry eyes of the magistrate.
"I'm not going to inherit anything," he said. "And that's the way I like it. I don't want to be beholden to
anybody!" Number One Grandfather's
beard, Wen noted, was as dry, thin and gray-green as the dying fronds of a
coconut tree.
Wen stopped. It had
suddenly become very quiet in the courtroom. The magistrate eyes flickered with
something dark and extremely malevolent.
Everyone else was staring at him.
"Why can't you all just leave me alone?" he asked none of them
and all of them. "And why can't I
have a drink?"
"Do I have any other cases this morning?" Li asked his clerk with careful, casual
disdain. "If not I should like to
watch this execution. I have grown quite
tired of having to deal with this irresponsible young man."
I'm getting tired of being called "irresponsible,"
Wen thought. Especially since it seems
to mean nothing more than that I don't want to do what you want me to do. Ghosts and magistrates, he thought: I'm tired
of them all.
"There are no other cases, sir," the clerk
said. "Shall I—"
At that moment another case was added to the docket.
Next Prologue Chapter 1
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