The ancestors were happily engaged in a violent discussion of comparative religion when Fengzi slammed her tiny hand on the demon's desk. "Are you here to help or not?" she shouted.
Number One Grandfather sidled over to Wen. "You really ought to reconsider that one," he said. "That's a temper you aren't going to enjoy dealing with."
Suddenly feeling about twelve years old, Wen stepped away from the old man. The flush was, he was certain, painted all over his face; he could only hope that Yin Fengzi hadn't seen it. "Please, Grandfather," he said, "can you read that scroll or not?"
"Of course I can read it. I'm dead!" Grandfather moved to the desk—it was something of a relief to see that he had to walk down here, just like everybody else—and began tracing his finger up the paper. "Damn," he muttered, "there sure are a lot of members of the Chan family in here. Some family reunion must have gone horribly wrong..."
"Would that be the Santa Clara Chans?" asked Great-Great-Great Grandfather. "I used to have crab-eating contests with old Chan Lin back in the day."
"It doesn't matter. Wait—here he is!" Number One Grandfather stabbed at the scroll with a bony finger; even the hair on the knuckles seemed to point down to the spot. "Oh, damn! Buggeration!"
"Language!" Wen said. "There's a lady present!"
"I sail on a pirate ship, Xia," said Fengzi, shaking her head. "You yourself have said far worse in front of me, to say nothing of the rest of the crew."
Wondering what was happening to him, Wen smiled—ineptly, he was sure—at Fengzi and returned to Number One Grandfather. "What's the matter?"
"That idiot demon." The old man looked around, as if expecting to find the object of his wrath hiding under the furniture. "It's no wonder he's stuck at this entry level job. He's completely fouled things up, and I can't imagine how you're going to fix this. Or even find out exactly what's wrong."
"What do you mean?" Wen fought back a strange sensation he suddenly recognized as panic. So that's what it feels like, he thought.
"Your father arrived here with incorrect paperwork," Number One Grandfather said. "That's one of the two ways people become hungry ghosts, and this idiot ought to have known what do to. But instead there's a list of about a dozen people who came in on that day with inadequate paperwork, and instead of processing them as hungry ghosts, this fool has sent them off back to the court of adjudication in the main hall of the Mirror of Retribution, to have their paperwork examined! As if the issue was simply that somebody made a mistake in filling in the form!"
"Well, isn't that what happened?"
"No! When a person dies and the rituals aren't performed, there usually isn't any paperwork at all! That's what 'inadequate paperwork' means in this department, and that's how Horse-Face and Ox-Head in the Court of the Mirror of Retribution know how to direct probationary hungry ghosts to this department in the first place!" Number One Grandfather had begun pacing around the office, and Wen was willing to bet that if the demon was anywhere nearby and could hear Grandfather's voice, it was now heading rapidly in the opposite direction. "This idiot demon—or possibly an even more stupid demon persuaded to do the job one day so the demon responsible for it could vanish somewhere and steal some time off—seems to have completely forgotten the rules of procedure. And so not only is your father not in this punishment department of the Hell of the Mirror of Retribution, I can't even tell you which hell he's been sent to."
"Well," said Wen, "can't we find out? You said he was sent to a court of some sort."
"And courts are supervised by magistrates." Number One Grandfather shot him a wicked smile. "What sort of luck have you had with magistrates lately, sonny?"
"They're not going to know anything about that down here, are they?"
"I don't think that's the point," said Fengzi. "The point is, magistrates tend to be similar people, on earth or in hell. If you think Magistrate Li was rigid and autocratic, imagine what you're going to get from a magistrate who was appointed to his position because Yanluo Wang, the original Yama king, wasn't considered tough enough."
"So my father is" —
"Lost in the bureaucracy," said Fengzi.
"Buggeration," said Wen.
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